Opportunities in Mushroom Farming

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Mushroom farming is a $60 billion industry, but the vast majority of it is growing just one species. Eban Bayer, co-founder and CEO of Ecovative says the fungal kingdom is vast and there are many other opportunities for mushroom farming to expand. He believes mushrooms can one day fit may uses cases, from food to materials, so the future potential for mushroom farmers is bright.

Bayer... "The fungal kingdom is the only thing out there that's going to scale and produce new products in the kind of regime that humans are looking for. And that would be things you wear on your body, things you'd put in your body like food, and maybe things you'd put around your body like construction materials or like automotive components. Growing animal cells like what we think of as cellular agriculture in a petri dish or in a reactor, it's just never going to compete at scale with plants or animals. Full stop. And I will, I'll see you next time. Stand on that for the next 50 years. So it's got like a techno-economic problem. Mycelium doesn't make mycelium's around. It's just growing mushrooms. It fits in the industrial economy and it can do things that are animal-like that plants can't do. And it can do things that are plastic, like that nothing else can do. And that makes it, I think, a very attractive place to look. And I think combined with the fact that maybe it got 3 percent of the attention intellectually or economically over the past 50 years, even less than that 0. 3%, 0. 03%. Compared to say like the economic effort that's gone into corn or wheat just means that there's likely some low-hanging fruit for humanity to be found there."

That’s Ecovative co-founder and CEO, Eban Bayer. Learn more at ecovative.com.