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Comment by novantadue | Hacker News Reader

Seems a lot cheaper to grow mushrooms than raise pigs.

Possibly - but pigs are fairly hardy, and have very few dietary limitations, so you can often buy very cheap feed, or just let them forage.

Basically - outside of the cost of the land, pork is really cheap to raise, even for small farmers. As low as $0.64/lb for commercial production, and around $2.50/lb for small farmers and families.

Current mushroom production methods are FAR more expensive (just the spore cost can be $0.50 to $1.00 per lb).

This might scale to make it cheaper, but I'd be pretty surprised. Mushrooms require much more intensive care and handling.

Depending on the species used mushrooms can be cultivated very, very, very cheaply. You only have to look at the average cost of agaricus mushroom per lb ($1.5 - $2) wholesale vs processed whole pork per lb ($6- $7) wholesale to see that. Mushrooms also have a much shorter supply chain in terms of inputs and much less water input.

Creating more spores from mushrooms is incredibly easy and cost effective, so is creating liquid culture which is a process that allows you to create huge amounts of mycelial growing base you can then introduce to more growth medium(corn syrup and water that's been sterilized).

not sure man, mushrooms need food too. Pigs can eat waste, can mushroom eat waste?

Pretty much by definition, that is what mushrooms and other fungi do.

The entire reason the kingdom funga exists is to eat waste. You may have heard that dead trees piled up for millions of years before fungi came along, whereafter they carved a new niche for themselves in the ecosystem and consumed the detritus. Life finds a way ;)

Fungi, not funga - it’s masculine not neuter.

funga is the name of the kingdom, a recent change to align with the now-accepted designations flora and fauna (and of course bacteria and protista). Fungi is the plural when referring to organisms (i.e., instances), I am rather referring to the kingdom (i.e., the category).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funga

Seems like it has no historical usage[0] and is not a valid form of fungus[1], from what I can tell. Kind of a weird choice.

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/funga [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fungus#Declension

Thanks for the clarification. It’s still sounding ugly, like if someone decided that the kingdom of mugroomz would include multiple mushrooms, but I guess it’s too late to complain

Oyster mushrooms grow on wood chips and old coffee grounds. Not exactly expensive.

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