Mida Mushroom Food uses edible mushroom bags three times to achieve recycling and pioneer a new model of sustainable mushroom cultivation without cutting down trees

General News Jan 1, 1970 0 views

Super recycling: one mushroom bag planted three times! Mida Mushroom Food pioneers a new model of sustainable mushroom cultivation, growing mushrooms without cutting down trees

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Standing in the mushroom shed, Cheng Jen-kai is like a ray of sunlight illuminating the darkness. This year is the 5th year since "Mida Mushroom Food" was founded. Mida Mushroom Food uses rice straw and coffee grounds to make its own space bags and cultivates its own spawn to grow oyster mushrooms. After the oyster mushrooms are harvested, the discarded mushroom bags can be used to grow button mushrooms. After the button mushrooms are grown, these spent mushroom substrates can also be used to grow crops such as ginger or strawberries, which means the materials are used three times. This newly started mushroom farm fully embodies the spirit of "environmentally friendly and recycling."

A farmer's son with flame tattoos, he traveled abroad to learn "sustainable mushroom cultivation"

Meeting Cheng Jen-kai for the first time, the kiss marks left by flames on his body are deeply impressionable. Born into a farming family in Changhua, he suffered extensive burns over his whole body more than ten years ago due to work, and later worked at the Sunshine Foundation and Taiwan Yuanwei. In 2012, while working at Taiwan Yuanwei, Cheng Jen-kai frequently visited the Indigenous communities in Wulai, New Taipei, which became the opportunity for his later entrepreneurship.

Cheng Jen-kai recalled that at the time, together with Wu Mei-mao of Taiwan Yuanwei and the Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation, he went up the mountain to guide Indigenous people in converting to organic farming methods. Many Indigenous people on the mountain grew shiitake mushrooms on logs, and in the process of establishing demonstration farms, he discovered that mushroom cultivation produced a considerable amount of waste.

"Growing mushrooms requires a lot of wood chips, but the source of these wood chips is unclear, and dealing with the spent mushroom substrate after cultivation is also a headache." Cheng Jen-kai originally planned to first learn at the Wulai demonstration farm and then return to his hometown in Changhua to farm. At this time, he met Li Yi-chen, who also wanted to farm. She proposed Gunter Pauli's "Blue Economy" model: the role of fungi in nature is that of decomposers, breaking down the remains of animals and plants for other organisms to use, and income can be created based on this characteristic.

So Cheng Jen-kai, Li Yi-chen, and a third partner, Chou Meng-chieh, went together to Serbia to learn how to grow mushrooms in an environmentally sustainable way, and then in 2015 co-founded Mida Mushroom Food, with the shared idea of using traceable and reusable materials to grow mushrooms.

Mida Mushroom Food founder Cheng Jen-kai grows mushrooms with rice straw and coffee grounds, and recycles the spent mushroom substrate from different stages (photo / Lin Yi-chun)

A paradise-like mushroom farm: a one-stop operation for culturing spawn, growing mushrooms, making space bags, and sales

Mida Mushroom Food farm is located in Pingxi District, New Taipei City. Turning off from the bustling Shifen Old Street and following the Pingshuang Industrial Road up the mountain is the route Cheng Jen-kai must take every day. He leaves home at 7 a.m. every day and returns home around 8 p.m. after busying himself at the mushroom farm. "Carrying materials up the mountain and delivering goods down the mountain" is a portrayal of his daily commute.

"For outsiders like us to enter the mushroom-growing circle could be called audacious." Cheng Jen-kai said that domestic mushroom farms each occupy their own turf, and many are second-, third-, or even fourth-generation family businesses, with solid foundations in both mushroom-growing equipment and technology.

But Mida Mushroom Food had to figure everything out on its own and boldly attempted a "one-stop operation." Cheng Jen-kai explained that the mushroom-growing industry is already quite mature, with purchasing channels for everything from inoculation, mushroom-growing media, and various materials. Mida Mushroom Food, however, handles everything from culturing spawn, making space bags, production scheduling, and mushroom-growing techniques, figuring out a feasible path by itself.

Using rice straw, makino bamboo shavings, and coffee grounds to make "big tree bags"

Walking into the 400-ping mushroom farm, before seeing any mushrooms, you first smell a burst of coffee aroma. The scent comes from coffee grounds piled into a small mountain, and this is one of the mushroom-growing media. Cheng Jen-kai uses organic rice straw from Shangshui Friendly Farming in Xizhou, Changhua, unprocessed makino bamboo shavings from a raw materials factory in Zhushan, Nantou, and coffee grounds from King Car (with Rainforest Alliance Certified RAC and UTZ Certified Good Coffee) in specific proportions to make the "big tree bags" for growing mushrooms.

"It is not called a space bag, but a big tree bag, because in nature fungi mostly run their mycelium on trees or near trees." Cheng Jen-kai explained that growing mushrooms requires spawn and medium soil. After the big tree bag is completed, the cultured spawn is inoculated onto it, allowing the spawn to decompose the medium inside the big tree bag in order to grow.

Plump and beautiful oyster mushrooms grown with recycled materials (provided by Cheng Jen-kai)

Workers entering the big tree bag production room must be wrapped up completely. "This is to avoid contamination by foreign bacteria," Cheng Jen-kai explained. Workers first wash all incoming materials, drain them, put them into a boiler for sterilization, then stir them, and then make the big tree bags.

Cheng Jen-kai recalled that when they first started making big tree bags, they could not control the moisture content well due to insufficient equipment, and the spawn had been stored for more than three months, which reduced its activity. At that time, for the newly started and still immature Mida Mushroom Food, this was undoubtedly a major blow. Only after repeated failures and trials did they finally succeed.

Culturing spawn on their own by imitating a laboratory, arranging production according to orders

In addition to the big tree bag production room, the mushroom farm has another place that also requires being "fully armed" to enter, and that is the spawn culturing room.

The spawn culturing room contains an incubator, a sterile workbench, a sterilizer, and more. The most eye-catching are the large and small Erlenmeyer flasks on the shelves. Inside the flasks are wheat and spawn, and the outside is labeled with the inoculation time and spawn type. Cheng Jen-kai walked into the spawn culturing room, took out the spawn from the culture dishes in the incubator, and explained one by one, "You first culture it in the middle of the culture dish, observe the growth speed of each spawn type, and only after it is fully grown will it be placed into an Erlenmeyer flask to reproduce."

Cheng Jen-kai was also not negligent about the source of the culture medium in the culture dishes. He boiled friendly-farmed potatoes and added agar powder as a gel. Different mushroom species also reproduce at different speeds in the Erlenmeyer flasks, and the fastest to reproduce is the oyster mushroom. When inoculated at the same time, the mycelium of other mushrooms such as lion's mane mushroom and wood ear mushroom had only covered part of the wheat, while the oyster mushroom mycelium had already filled the entire bottle, like a bottle of pure white snowflakes.

Mida Mushroom Food cultures and grows its own spawn (photo / Lin Yi-chun)

Once the spawn in the bottle is fully grown, it is planted onto the big tree bag, and then the mycelium slowly runs downward. Only after the mycelium has spread throughout will mushrooms grow. Holes are opened on the big tree bag at specific intervals to let the mushrooms poke out and "fruit." Different spawn types are moved to different areas to grow. The spawn bags for oyster mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, wood ear mushrooms, and lion's mane mushrooms are moved to mushroom houses built with black netting, while some oyster mushrooms and button mushrooms are moved to environmentally controlled mushroom houses. Cheng Jen-kai explained that mushroom growth in environmentally controlled mushroom houses is more stable, and before shipping, they are all moved to environmentally controlled mushroom houses, with scheduling adjusted according to orders.

After growing oyster mushrooms, grow button mushrooms; the second-stage spent substrate can also be used to grow strawberries

The seemingly orderly mushroom houses actually went through a painstaking process. Cheng Jen-kai said that unlike mushroom-growing families that pass down experience, Mida Mushroom Food had to explore and experiment entirely on its own. "For example, the suitable growing temperature for mushrooms is 15°C to 25°C, and how to water them so they grow beautifully. These are already common knowledge for mushroom farms run for several generations, but we can only learn them through experiments." In addition to temperature and humidity, ventilation control is also very important, because mushrooms release carbon dioxide and heat as they grow. The environment must be ventilated, but cannot be directly exposed to wind.

Since it broke away from the traditional mushroom-growing model, Mida Mushroom Food is unafraid to experiment. The large, pure white button mushrooms in the mushroom house were grown by Cheng Jen-kai upholding his original intention of recycling.

Cheng Jen-kai said that oyster mushrooms produce a lot of spent substrate. When originally thinking about how to reuse it, he unexpectedly discovered that it could be used to grow button mushrooms. Compared with other mushrooms, oyster mushroom spawn grows quickly and its mycelium is relatively strong. "Oyster mushrooms are essentially 'organizing' the big tree bag into an environment suitable for other mushrooms to grow." After the oyster mushrooms are harvested, the substrate can be used to grow button mushrooms, and with additional material it can also be used to grow wood ear mushrooms and shiitake mushrooms.