Introduction

Small-scale mushroom production represents an opportunity for farmers interested in an additional enterprise and is a specialty option for farmers without much land. This publication is designed for market gardeners who want to incorporate mushrooms into their systems and for those farmers who want to use mushroom cultivation as a way to extract value from woodlot thinnings and other "waste" materials. Mushroom production can play an important role in managing farm organic wastes when agricultural and food processing by-products are used as growing media for edible fungi. The spent substrate can then be composted and applied directly back to the soil. This publication includes resources for entrepreneurs who wish to do further research.

Many people are intrigued by mushrooms nutritional and medicinal properties, in addition to their culinary appeal. Mushrooms contain many essential amino acids; white button mushrooms, for example, contain more protein than kidney beans. Shiitake mushrooms are less nutritious, but are still a good source of protein. As a group, mushrooms also contain some unsaturated fatty acids, provide several of the B vitamins, and vitamin D. Some even contain significant vitamin C, as well as the minerals potassium, phosphorus, calcium, and magnesium.

Asian traditions maintain that some specialty mushrooms provide health benefits. Chinese doctors use at least 50 species. Two recent books, Medicinal Mushrooms: An Exploration of Tradition, Healing and Culture and Medicinal Mushrooms You Can Grow, detail existing research on the health benefits of mushrooms. See the Resource section at the end of this guide for specifics on these books and other sources of information

Producing nutritious food at a profit, while using materials that would otherwise be considered "waste," constitutes a valuable service in the self-sustaining community we might envision for the future.

Mushroom production is labor- and management-intensive. Specialty mushrooms are not a "get rich quick" enterprise. On the contrary, it takes a considerable amount of knowledge, research, planning, and capital investment to set up a production system. You must also be prepared to face sporadic fruiting, invasions of "weed" fungi, insect pests, and unreliable market prices.
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