lab 10 Monterey mushroom tour

Today, Dr.Ebbole and Dr. Shaw took us for the Monterey mushroom tour. Here is the farm for the mushroom production.

 There is a big mushroom statue on the front gate to show us it is the right place. We are here!!!

One manager from Monterey gave a good introduction for the background of this company. 

The manager explained how mushroom are produced in the workshop step by step. He also showed us material sample from each step.

This is the procedure for mushroom production. It was draw by the manager. The rough process is ferment straw as mushroom growth medium, inoculate with fungus on the straw bed, grow mushroom for 21 days and harvest.

This is the conveyor belt for mixing the component for straw bed. The components includes dry straw, urea, chicken manure and some other components for promoting fermentation. 

The mixing process is controlled by the program showed on the computer.

This is straw mixtures come down from the conveyor belt. These are ready for loading into straw bed box. 

After straw bed are loaded into individual box. They stacked them high to save space. In this way, they can use relatively limited space to produce fairly large amount of mushroom.

Fermented straw bed is loaded in these boxes. In order to keep the moisture, workers need to spray water to wet all the straw bed thoroughly every day. They need to climb up the stack rack in order to reach the top layer.

These are grains which are already inoculated with fungi. The white mess is fungal mycelia. Inoculated grains can help fungus evenly spread on the fermented straw bed. 

This is a straw bed already mix with inoculated grains. These racks will be moved to a different growth chamber with a relatively low temperature because fermented straw bed automatically produce heat. Fast mycelium growth need a relatively low temperature, so they use a lower growth chamber temperature to compromise the heat comes from the fermentation. In this picture, the straw bed is covered with mycelia. These beds are almost ready for mushroom production.

These series of picture showed different growth stage of mushroom. After full growth of mycelium, the straw bed racks will be moved to another chamber with high huminity to promote the germination of mushroom. After 21 days of growth, mushrooms are ready to harvest. Each straw bed can harvest three batches of mushroom. Workers manully harvest mushroom and sort them out base on the size. They are paid by how many mushroom they picked everyday. It's a tough job especially to harvest the mushroom in the top layer. In order to reach them, pickers have to step on racks for a long time. 

After three time harvest, the straw bed material is supposed to be run out of nutrient. They will be processed as pot soil to sell as gardening material. 

Discussion:
It's a fun trip. I enjoy it and the good weather. From the trip, what impressed me the most is mushroom is produced from urea and chicken manure. I also learned a new word "manure". I feel it's a very good and efficient way to recycle biowaste. Another thing that impressed me is after they use up the material for mushroom production, they sell it as garden soil because after fermentation, the biowaste has a lot nutrient and it's good for garden plants growth. In this way, the company compensates the cost for purchasing the raw material for production. Plus, they earn from selling mushrooms. I feel this company earn money with almost no expense. If they can open a little restaurant besides the factory,  people can enjoy a meal made from fresh picked mushroom, their business of the factory tour would be better .