Commercial Mushroom Farming: From Spore to Sale

Course outline

1. 1. Foundations: fungi, mushrooms and the opportunity6 lessons

   • How to use this course
   • What a fungus actually is
   • The mushroom life cycle
   • How fungi feed — and why only saprotrophs are farmable
   • Mushroom anatomy and the words you will use daily
   • Why mushrooms are a serious crop

2. 2. Choosing your species and your scale7 lessons

   • A decision framework for picking your crop
   • Oyster mushrooms (*Pleurotus* spp.)
   • Shiitake (*Lentinula edodes*)
   • Button and portabella (*Agaricus bisporus*) — a different business
   • Specialty and medicinal: king oyster, lion's mane, reishi
   • Sizing the operation: 20 kg, 100 kg, 500 kg a week
   • What you may legally grow and sell in South Africa

3. 3. The production cycle, end to end5 lessons

   • The map: culture to market
   • Batch thinking: cycle times, room turns and scheduling
   • Site layout and clean-to-dirty flow
   • A worked 12-week production calendar
   • The numbers you must track from day one

4. 4. The lab: cultures, agar and strains8 lessons

   • Do you need a lab? Buy versus make
   • The principles of sterile technique
   • Your clean space: still air box versus laminar flow
   • Media: PDA, MEA and pouring plates
   • Sterilisation: autoclave and pressure-cooker parameters
   • Cloning a mushroom and isolating a culture
   • The culture library: slants, storage and senescence
   • Recognising lab contaminants

5. 5. Spawn production6 lessons

   • What spawn is, and the buy-versus-make decision
   • Choosing and preparing grain
   • Sterilising and inoculating grain
   • Managing the spawn run
   • Liquid culture
   • Sawdust spawn, plug spawn and master spawn

6. 6. Substrates for oyster, shiitake and lion's mane8 lessons

   • What fungi eat: lignin, cellulose and the C:N ratio
   • Calculating a C:N ratio for your own mix
   • Bulk substrate options in South Africa
   • Supplementation and the contamination trade-off
   • Moisture and field capacity
   • Pasteurisation versus sterilisation
   • Practical pasteurisation: hot water, steam and lime
   • Sawdust blocks for shiitake and lion's mane

7. 7. Composting and casing for *Agaricus*6 lessons

   • Why *Agaricus* needs compost
   • Phase I: the composting yard
   • Phase II: pasteurisation and conditioning
   • Phase III: bulk spawn run — and the economics of buying compost
   • Casing: what it is and why it works
   • After casing: CACing, ruffling and watering

8. 8. Inoculation, incubation and the spawn run5 lessons

   • Inoculation rates and technique
   • Bags, blocks, bottles and beds
   • Designing and running the incubation room
   • Managing heat — the South African summer bottleneck
   • Reading colonisation: good, bad and abort

9. 9. The fruiting room8 lessons

   • The four variables and what each one controls
   • Species parameter tables for spawn run and fruiting
   • Triggering pinning
   • Grow-room engineering: structure, insulation and layout
   • Air: fresh air exchange, distribution and CO₂ control
   • Humidity and water
   • Cooling, heating and power in a South African climate
   • Troubleshooting by symptom

10. 10. Pests, diseases and biosecurity7 lessons

    • The biosecurity mindset: zoning and flow
    • Flies: sciarids, phorids and cecids
    • Fungal diseases: green mould, dry bubble, wet bubble, cobweb
    • Bacterial blotch and water management
    • Mites, nematodes and virus
    • Cook-out and the between-crop protocol
    • An IPM programme you can legally run in South Africa

11. 11. Harvest, post-harvest and value-adding7 lessons

    • When to pick: maturity indices by species
    • Picking technique, hygiene and labour productivity
    • Flushes, rest periods and when to terminate a crop
    • The cold chain
    • Grading, packing and labelling to South African standards
    • Drying and dried product
    • Powder, vitamin D, extracts and spent substrate

12. 12. Building the business8 lessons

    • Compliance: Certificate of Acceptability, R638 and produce grading
    • Costing your production: a worked cost-per-kilogram model
    • Capital: what you actually have to buy
    • Pricing and margin
    • Break-even, cash flow and payback
    • Finding buyers: channels for a small South African grower
    • Funding and support in South Africa
    • Your first 90 days