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What are the ideal conditions for growing mushrooms, or is it different depending on the species? Could you kind of run me through that and where you grow your mushrooms now?
Yeah, so it does vary a bit from species to species. It also varies from different stages of growth. So we have different rooms for different stages of growth, but we do our best to grow mushrooms that have similar requirements so we can grow them in the same conditions. So we have an incubation room, which is where we do all of the… it's where we allow the mycelium to slowly grow through the substrate. And once it's grown through the substrate, it then moves into our fruiting room, which is where we actually grow the mushrooms from the substrate. So the requirements of those two rooms are very different. The incubation is a very dry warm room and it's completely dark. The fruiting room is a sort of colder room; it's about 15 degrees Celsius. It's very humid. We have a big humidifier. It looks cloudy when you walk in there. It's so foggy, you can't really see in front of you. And we have to keep a lot of fresh air in there, so we constantly have big fans running.
If you had to give me a fun fact about mushrooms, what would it be?
I would probably point you towards the cordyceps mushroom. It's this really bizarre little mushroom. You might have heard of it. It grows through living insects and kind of controls their body. It is almost like brainwashing them. The different species have different actions that they put on the insects but... One in particular grows through living ants and causes them to climb up very tall trees to the very top of the tree. They find a big leaf and a vein in the leaf, and they bite down into the vein so that the ant has a constant supply of water, and then the ant dies there, and the mushroom goes out of the ant's head and then it releases spores, which can get dispersed all across the jungle. So, it's a really weird like brain-control, mind-washing mushroom. I don't know how best to put it, but it's a really weird, creepy mushroom.
I suppose maybe not necessarily fully vegan then, right? Some of these mushrooms.
Yeah, well, that's the point. Yeah, you can grow them on rice so that's the trick that they use to produce vegan cordyceps. They grow it on rice that's cooked in a nutrient broth.
