The Secret Lives of Fungi

That’s very cool. Where did you get the spores? Resources for the whole process?

For 100% metric people, that means 1 cubic metre of soil contains ~11 kilometres of mycelium.

Edit: sorry, I mean 7 miles in one INCH^3 of soil!!

Make sure you keep a HEPA filter running so you don’t get mushroom lung from the spores. If you’re growing in the hundreds of pounds per week I wouldn’t even go into that room without full PPE.

Please share more about this! I’ve been thinking about trying this myself, and I’d love to hear more, about both the tech / ops side, and the economic side.

I just ordered a couple of grow kits from you. Cheers!

I found it amusing that you offer a “mushroom column” rental where you grow oyster mushrooms for others, and they can track progress and eventually receive the fruits of their “labor”. Mushrooms as a Service?

Personally, I think they’re fairly easy to grow so I can’t imagine someone paying others to do so - however I wonder if this idea could work for other types of farming, especially if the user could interact with and adjust parameters for their “column” or plot, and eventually choose when to harvest it.

Think of it as a virtual community farm - where a user can manage a mini-farm and have control over various parameters for their plot: light, humidity, irrigation, etc. They could maybe even get a live stream of their crops, or receive time-lapse updates of progress weekly. Telefarming? Telehydroponics? I could brainstorm a couple other interesting directions to take this...

This seems off by orders of magnitude.

From data (Mycorrhizal Functioning: An Integrative Plant-Fungal Process; Michael Allen) an estimate of 200cm per gram of soil is mentioned. This would translate to 2000m per kilogram and 2.000.000m = 2000km per tonne of soil. A cubic meter of soil should weight on average 2.6g/mL so it would come out even higher at 5200 km per cubic meter.

Just nitpicking :)

Fantastic film. Also recommend the book by the same title, as well as watching almost any of the (Ted) talks by Paul Stamets.

I found myself not liking the film very much, despite finding parts of it educational and illuminating.

Particularly, I found it really bizarre that it discusses the stoned ape theory without mentioning any of the criticism or prevailing theories against it. The movie just passes it (and most other things Stamets believes) along as unchallenged gospel.

It took me out of it and made the film feel (even more) ideologically one-sided, despite the fact that the film is full of interesting detail otherwise.

A good rule of thumb is that everything an organism does costs energy. If a bacterium produces the proteins necessary to break down plastic, create gasoline precursors, etc, then it likely paid for that with a reduced ability to defend itself or otherwise compete outside of a sterile environment. The energy/labor cost to maintain that environment for your bioreactor can be cost prohibitive (either in the narrow sense in which you put yourself at a disadvantage because competitors use cheaper strategies or even in the broad sense where, e.g., energy costs are large enough to completely counteract any environmental benefits).

It's fairly common for the waste products to be toxic to your microorganisms (or to need a high concentration of the growth medium, etc). If that mixed output of partially digested waste, biomass, etc is not useful by itself (e.g. because it's a little less environmentally impactful than the raw precursors) then you're faced with the challenge of modifying or purifying it into something that is worthwhile.

There aren't a lot of economically sustainable business models you can build around "healing the environment," however beneficial it might be. If you aren't directly producing something profitable (e.g. construction materials made from fungi) then your main path to profitability is to rely on donations of some kind (sometimes charitable donations or crowdfunding, usually grants or other legal maneuverings). Mind you, I think that has potential to be a great outcome -- tax businesses proportionally to the damage they do (banning practices we don't know how to clean up) and simultaneously fund businesses who fix it. That funding route is still pretty unpolished though, and any business pursuing that avenue is fighting a regulatory battle on top of any biotech problems.

Etc.

They're too tasty to ignore the edible aspect. Also knowing which ones are edible (and ones that are not) is a survival skill.