![]() ![]() We just want to sell the seed to the farmer. ![]() “If you think about it, farmers don’t do genetics and culture work for their seeds right? They just buy the seeds and they grow. Then it hit me, that this is what every single small farm is going through.” Sewidan explains. “When we started, it was really hard to get every variable right. They sell their ready-to-fruit blocks to small farmers, who don’t have time, space nor proper equipment to perfect the mushroom fruiting formula. When the mycelium spreads across the block, turning it from brown to white, it’s grow time.Īlthough New Hope sells their fresh mushrooms to anyone who knocks on their door, they’ve recently found a niche as the connective tissue in the mushroom farming supply chain. Here, sterilized blocks of chopped wood pellets are slowly taken over by white branching strands of mycelium, the vegetative part of fungi that usually lives underground, though you may know its spider web-like appearance if you’ve let a moldy bread loaf go too far. “I get the question all the time at farmer’s markets, are these edible? They think they’re decoration,” Sewidan says as Hance holds a block sprouting a stunning bouquet of golden oyster mushrooms.īefore a block erupts with oysters, it undergoes a transformation in a dark, climate-controlled incubation room. Sewidan has a knack for this sort of experimental entrepreneurship after years managing an indoor lettuce farm venture and dabbling in CBD extraction.ĭown the hallway in other grow rooms, we encounter rows of reishi, chestnut, lion’s mane and oyster blooming with shrooms. Hance, Sewidan and their building manager started this exploratory operation just a year ago, after sprucing up the complex and removing some pesky biohazards. His face turns to just delight when we find a shiitake mushroom fused atop another and somehow growing upside down. “Shiitake lives in three or four different stages and if at any point you screw up, it's ruined, period.” These are their best shiitake blocks yet, but Hance wants them fully covered in fruiting mushrooms. “They look nice but they are very hard to grow.”ĭepending on the species, the recipe for success is complex, explains farm manager Joe Hance, eyeing the block with a mix of delight and frustration. “These are shiitake,” Sewidan says, pulling down a block to show off the shaggy-capped mushrooms popping out of it. He tosses a lab coat over his suit as we enter the massive metallic complex that houses 20 temperature-controlled rooms for growing, a lab, and a 40-foot-long tube used for sterilization.Ī steady mist showers shelves full of sprouting, brownish-grey mushrooms in the first grow room. ![]() “It feels like we are on a volcano that’s about to erupt,” says CEO Mohamed Sewidan, referring to the fast growing fascination with mushrooms in pop culture, medicine and beyond. Also inside is a small team with big visions for this fungi operation in suburban Minnesota. Facing the nondescript brick facade outside New Hope Farmacy, you’d never guess that within the building lies the largest indoor mushroom farm in the country.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |