A little behind the scenes here at Millbrook Mushrooms
Ever wonder what it takes to own a mushroom farm? Many don’t realize that our mushrooms actually grow indoors! Today, lets talk about what goes into the making of your favorite mushrooms here at Millbrook Mushrooms.
It starts with recreating a growing environment for the mushrooms. We grow our mushrooms in bags with the highest quality of food for them - oak wood and soy sourced from Arkansas, Kentucky and Oklahoma. The bags are put through a sterilization process - think pressure cooker - for a minimum of 18 hours.
Then we introduce the spores to the bags. Whether spawn we purchase through top quality growers or cultures grown in our lab, our state of the art laboratory is a sterile environment where the air quality is pure for our lab work including inoculation.
Once inoculated in our lab, our mushrooms go into the incubation room where each bag creates mycelium. In essence, a weave of mushroom roots that grow in the bag. Below is a video of our incubation room on one of our fun Saturday evenings working on the farm!
Once the mushrooms are done incubating, we move them into our fruiting room. Our fruiting room was thoughtfully designed and engineered, with high humidity, variety of lights, temperature controlled, and specific air flows which includes fresh air.
When temperatures change outside, it impacts what happens in the fruiting room. If there is a fluctuation in temperature outside, we need to focus on the temperature inside with the right humidity. It isn’t as easy as one may think.
We also designed our fruiting room with the quality of our mushrooms as top of mind - what would they like and what is the best environment for them.
And as mushrooms fruit, they give off live spores so it is very important to wear respirators when in the fruiting room. Also with any moist environment, bacteria can grow so it is critical to wear gloves and sanitize as often as possible.
A clean mushroom farm is crucial to the success of growing mushrooms from the time you make grow bags and inoculate to the time the mushrooms incubate and fruit and to the time we harvest. Everything is sanitized throughout the process.
Once they fruit, we harvest! Harvesting happens nearly every day at Millbrook Mushrooms since we deliver to restaurants, retailers and Farmer’s Markets 6-7 days a week!
Those familiar with farming, it is hard work and requires a 24-7 commitment which is why we so appreciate of farmers. Kyle grew up on a farm and lived a farm life first hand. He knows what it takes and the dedication required.
There have been times that we have come home from a long day to then have to tend to the mushroom farm in the evening. Or sometimes things happen in the middle of the night like a power outage or a freeze, we have to plug in the generator or defrost a pipe! The farm is operational every day.
An advertisement a few years ago resonated with us on the life of a farmer. Paul Harvey’s God Made a Farmer in a Ram Truck commercial. We are blessed to be farmers and His calling of us.