Stretch target - Cool Room

We made it!! 

Now we can try to add the final small touch!

We cannot thank you all enough, we are totally overwhelmed with how positive and beautiful this process has been. It is so heart-warming and humbling to see so many of you support young people entering organic, localised agriculture! Now that we have reached our goal to gain the essentials to continue our operation, we have one last dream we would love to reach for!

With an extra $2,000 we aim to purchase a small cool room to store all these extra mushrooms we are going to be producing. We want to offer you all the best quality product we can possibly offer. To succeed in this, we always try to time our harvest as closely to farmers markets and restaurant deliveries as we possibly can. However, we can't always get it 100% correct when working with an organism like mycelium. So, to store our mushrooms and keep them in the best possible condition before they reach you, we need to be able to store them. So here is our dream to try and reach a little extra funding to purchase a cool room.

We thank you all SO much for your incredible support, we are full of joy and excitement to know we are upscaling our farm to continue producing for you! We have 7 days to go, and one last little bit to reach for. You will be hearing more from us soon!!

Mush Love,

Kat & Dan xx

Who we are…

We are Kat and Dan! We are a young couple who left behind our fast-paced city lifestyles at the end of 2016 seeking change. We wanted to cause less harm to the environment and ideally grow food for our community.  After driving from Perth to the Sunshine Coast Hinterland, we dove into a two-week permaculture course and ended up spending 12 months, studying & living under the guidance of our teacher and mentor. We put our heads together and decided to create a business producing good quality, local, organic food.

Without the finances to purchase a piece of land of our own and having always been fascinated by fungi, we realised we didn’t need to own land to actualise our dream. We were lucky enough to have a short-term house sit with an unused old pineapple packing shed, which the owner allowed us to use to begin our mushroom production experiments. So we sold our van and invested all we had into creating a small scale mushroom growing project. Once we had the go-ahead to remain using the space long term, in 2017 MountainTop Mushrooms was born.

Where we are now…

Our small mushroom farm is 18 months old. We have spent endless days working hard perfecting the craft of producing high quality gourmet mushrooms and have had an amazing response from our community. We have made precious relationships with chefs in the local area, as well as customers from numerous local farmers markets which we attend weekly. We have been featured on The Design Files, a popular lifestyle blog and most recently were featured on Better Homes and Gardens where Fast Ed visited our farm. We are currently the only small-scale gourmet mushroom farm on the Sunshine Coast who focus on selling to the public, as well as to restaurants. This incredible response to our project has inspired us to continue working towards our goals of being the best little mushroom farm we can be.

See our Better Homes and Gardens segment with Fast Ed here:

https://www.bhg.com.au/daniel-jarrett-and-mushroom-spring-rolls

Read more about our story on The Design Files here:

https://thedesignfiles.net/2018/12/regional-mountaintop-mushrooms-farm-queensland/

Since entering the gourmet fungi industry, we discovered what an exciting time of development the fungi world is experiencing. There are people all over the world working hard to constantly evolve this industry and make it more sustainable and environmentally friendly. The research into the amazing benefits of gourmet, culinary and medicinal mushrooms has only just begun, and already the results are fascinating. Our dream is to provide the Sunshine Coast access to this industry, its developments and the amazing benefits that go with it.

But - we need your help …

With our initial investment, we built a small farm which was a perfect first step to learning how to grow gourmet mushrooms. 18 months later, the farm is producing at capacity and the workload is increasing. We are both currently working 2 part-time jobs each, on top of mushroom farming, to supplement our income. There is a strong demand for our produce, but we are running ourselves ragged keeping up supply. We end up working long hours with little rest. We know this situation is unsustainable long term and will may even end in burnout. We are so passionate and driven to continue growing food for our community that we are determined not to give up on this dream.

We know the solution is to upgrade the farm and each quit one of our part-time jobs. We could then devote that time to the mushroom farm. We have put most of our money into this project so far and therefore don’t have the finances to fund this upgrade ourselves. Hence, we are humbly turning to our community for support. It is not easy to ask for help, however, to grow a small from an empty shed into a sustainable food production space takes a community, and we need all the help we can get. We have figured out the new infrastructure we will need to allow us to supply more, expand the varieties we offer and continue farming.

We are always striving to:

• Always remain environmentally friendly Minimise our waste output
• Minimise energy input (eventually moving to solar electricity)
• Minimise our waste output

What we need to do:

Pasteurising Equipment:

Before we can grow mushrooms we need to pasturise our substrate mix to remove any contaminants like mould or bacteria that will negatively impact the mushroom growth. Pasteurising is similar to sterilising, however does not kill off all living organisms, it just takes out the nasties we need to remove, to ensure our mushrooms grow happily. 

We need to purchase an IBC, an industrial sized plastic container, which is what we will use to pasteurise our substrate. To go with this, Kat’s Dad, who has a mechinical background, has designed for us, a custom gantry to lift the wet substrate with an electric hoist. We have been hand lifting mesh bags full of soaked substrate weighing up to 20kg which as you can imagine is labour intensive and extremely hard on our backs. Integrating this equipment into our farming process will allow us to grow much more mushrooms and save hours of hard labour, not to mention save our backs! We are especially looking forward to the benefits of this invaluable equipment.

Incubation Room Extension:

This is where the mushroom culture grows and begins to consume the substate until it is ready to be moved into the fruiting room and produce mushrooms. This can take anywhere between 2 – 3 weeks. Our incubation room was custom designed and built by us to fit our needs. We need to add an extension to this room to allow for more space. This will involve us completely dismantling it and reassembling it with the extension.  

Fruiting Room:

This is the final stage of our growing process and where the mushrooms grow. We need to build an insulated room about twice the size of what we are currently using. We plan to source cool room panels to do this. The insulation will allow for a much more stable internal climate. It will allow us to grow even better quality mushrooms, have a larger variety and extend their growing seasons.

Fruiting Room ventilation and humidification:

Mushrooms require lots of fresh air and high humidity. This system we will install will allow for fresh air circulation and maintain a high humidity in the fruiting room. This will ensure the mushrooms are growing in their ideal conditions. 

How much it costs

Pasteurising Equipment - $650

Incubation Room Extention - $1,350

Fruiting Room - $6,500

Fruiting Room Ventilation and Humidification -$750

Challenges

Every project like this faces many challenges. Here are some we know we may face during this process: 

• Fruiting room  - This is our biggest challenge. The room requires very specific conditions, like even distribution of fresh air and oxygen levels, while also maintaining a certain range of humidity. This room also requires a high quality filtration system to keep the air clean and free of contaminants. The conditions of the grow room directly influence how the mushrooms grow and getting everything right will be essential to growing a high quality product. We already have several design concepts, however reaching a final design to impliment will be dependant on R & D and plenty of trial and error.
• Learning to farm in our new space - like moving house, it takes time to adjust to your new surroundings and form new habits. This upgrade will mean we will need to spend time readjusting our practices (which we have perfected and streamlined for our current set up) to suit this new amazing model. We feel ready to take on this challenge, but know it will take some learning and failures to get to achieve success.
• Closing the farm during the upgrade  - We will be unable to produce mushrooms during the time of the new build, which means we can not provide to our community of local customers and chefs during this time. 
• Usual building problems - Dan has spent many years working with his hands before mushroom farming and has built everything from scratch so far on the farm. We plan on taking this same approach for this upgrade and know from experience any building project can encounter a multitude of problems going from design to reality. This is all part of the process but we are passionate about doing the work ourselves as we will have an enourmous sense of acheivment and a deeper appreciation for what we have once it is complete. We have great support from our friends and family who we can call on when we need an extra hand or two so we are in a really good position to tackle any problems that arise during this preiod.