Why should you cultivate mushroom spawn yourself instead of buying it?

Friends who follow Howsfood probably know that part of our work takes place in tribal orchards, where we work alongside farming friends to cultivate homemade microbial cultures using soil from the nearby old-growth forest, then use these cultures to improve the soil and make various kinds of compost. But we have never had a good chance to explain to friends why we do this.

Being friendly to the environment is certainly one of our aims, but if that were all, why not just buy organic fertilizer? If organic fertilizer is too expensive and we want to make our own compost, why not just buy microbial cultures from the market? Microbial cultures are not expensive, are they?

We must look past the surface problem to the deeper structure, otherwise our actions will achieve only half the results for twice the effort. So our insistence on doing things this way is not simply a matter of environmental friendliness and economic considerations (strictly speaking, it depends on what scale you use to calculate the economic benefit). The fact that today's farmers use large amounts of pesticides and chemical fertilizers is in fact tied in a chain of interlocking links to the highly commodified process of modern agriculture, and behind it all is the push from the "improper" intervention of modern science and technology.

Tribal elders: We used to do this ourselves too….

Let me start this interlocking story with a story... A few months ago, Xiaojun went to the tribal area for the first time to "demonstrate" to the younger generation of indigenous fruit farmers how to make microbial cultures. She took them into the old-growth forest in the same watershed to gather microbes to bring home and multiply and culture. Suddenly, a passing Yagi (a term of address for an elder woman) stopped and told us: "We used to do this too..." She said that in the past they would collect leftover rice from home, take it into the forest and leave it for a while (about a month or so), and once the rice had gone moldy, bring it back to the orchard (or the field; in the past Shuangqi tribe grew rice) and apply it to the soil.

Yagi's words set my mind turning. What I was thinking about was not that they had similar skills and "knowledge", but rather, how did all of this disappear? Why did it disappear? And as it disappeared, why did they switch to growing crops with chemical fertilizers and pesticides? Did this change improve the "efficiency" of farming? In the course of this transformation, what did they gain and what did they lose? What role did outside forces play in this transformation? What changes took place in social relations?

We are rolling out related programs one after another. Friends are welcome to visit our website to learn more and to support our consumer plan. Friends who are interested in us are also welcome to learn about Howsfood's social enterprise philosophy.