InnovatingSMART

THE INNOVATION:

Growing mushrooms in a nearly closed-loop system, integrating many advanced indoor growing technologies.

John Ashbaugh
CEO of Premier Mushrooms
www.premiermushrooms.com

Watch an Introductory Video:

Listen to the full story on Podcast:



Excerpts:
  • "We are a vertically-integrated company.  We start with a number of recycled materials: wheat straw, dried poultry waste, gypsum board, cotton seed meal. We mix it all together and start the decomposition process.  This becomes a substrate for our mushroom growing."
  • "We are a zero-discharge water facility... All of the water that we use for cleaning and watering gets captured back into a pond which we use for our composting process.  All of the stems, from our picking of mushrooms, are recycled and [become] part of our composting process.   The only output of our whole facility is our spent compost that goes back as a soil amendment to our local ranches and farms."
  • "In any agricultural process where you are controlling it as much as we are, there is cost associated with that.  You are going to use a lot of power...  Our goal is to reduce the usage through a number of programs that we have with PG&E and what is left is to figure out solar and other renewable programs, perhaps a digester, where we can reduce or eliminate [our energy use.]"
  • "I’ve been in a number of different industries: technology, Internet, assisted living.  What I have found is that there are things that are commonplace in [an] industry, that another industry may have never even contemplated using or thinking about, whether that is a distribution systems or technologies in one form or another. You really need to keep your eyes open to look at dissimilar industries to get ideas about what might work differently.  Set that in your path and be the innovator."


 

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Sue Lebeck 

  Cool Block Platform Director

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