Contamination is a very common problem that many startup growers have. If you loose less than 5% of your mushroom grow bags to molds and bacteria you don’t really have a problem; however, when you know that you struggle to put effort in making those substrate bags, purchase materials and spawn, spend energy on running your substrate disinfector and you loose up to 20 or 50% of your substrate bags to mold, then it’s a sign that there’s something going on.
When you’re just starting out with several tens of substrate bags this might not seem a serious issue but when you put up hundreds or thousands of bags at a time is something else.
The causes may be one or multiple. To find out you’ll need to scan all of your mushroom grow process and detect the problem(s) involved. Most times is quite hard to tell and when you had enough you’ll want to invest in a mentor able to solve the puzzle. A low investment for a solution that you’ll benefit from for a long time to come.
When contamination happens above 5% there is a lack of grower knowledge on the mushroom growing basics. Many growers start growing mushrooms ‘by the ear’ based on what they saw on the internet, or read in an article or some facebook group; however, this is not enough because one thing is to see how the process is done step-by-step and other is to understand why it’s done that way.
Many people prefer to go to a hands on workshop to learn but many times what they see doesn’t come with detailed explanations (unless they question every grow step). Then, they go home and try to apply what they learned and the surprise is that the mushrooms went crazy (the bags got moldy, bacteria takes over, the mushrooms don’t pop or something else pops instead, etc)
This happens when there’s a lack of mushroom cultivation basic knowledge and experience. When you start the right way and understand what’s going on every step of the way when you have up tens of substrate bags, you won’t have problems later when you’ll decide to increase your mushroom grow operation.
A farm that does a thousand bags at a time and didn’t invest in learning to understand the process in detail might run into issues. The curious thing is that the investment is just a couple of dollars at first (which is very low) but it is overlooked. When the problems start to appear the material loss is much higher and many feel discouraged. That’s when the grower starts to look into finding someone to solve their puzzle, but this comes with a high cost (Consulting costs).
Many times contamination is present because of:
- poor substrate disinfection
- the substrate material doesn’t match the disinfection schedule
- poor quality substrate
- substrate type
- bad strain
- climate conditions
- improper growroom cleaning management practices
- dirty tools
- the presence of contamination vectors such as flies or mites
- etc.
The beginner grower mostly runs into the poor substrate disinfection problem. It is essential to understand that heat disinfection of the substrate is more reliable than other disinfection methods. Some beginner growers start with the lime bath method (less reliable) and even sterilization -which comes with a different set of knowledge. Sometimes the beginner would use inappropriate substrate to grow mushrooms like wood shavings mixes from various woodwork sources -material that behaves differently because of the mix and the possible presence of antifungal solutions in the wood.
How to match the substrate with the disinfection method is described in The Low-tech Mushroom Grow Training For Beginners (Level 1&2).
Curiously the contamination issues are linked together and therefore when the problem comes it comes on multiple levels. For example, we’ll have to get rid of the flies first and that will reduce the green mold contamination level. Or we’ll have to learn mindfulness before manipulating random tools that enter in contact with the substrate.
There’s much to know and not easy to escape the contamination issue at the farm. However, what we can work on is to decrease it’s impact on the personnel and production line.
