Mana Mushrooms

Massachussetts

In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in beautiful Westport, Mana Mushrooms has developed a partnership with a community brewery/winery: Westport Rivers Winery and Buzzard's Bay Brewery. We built a model using ZERI design principles to achieve sustainable agriculture at the community scale.

Taking cues from E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and Gunter Pauli’s Upsizing, Mana Mushrooms seeks to supply the region with the highest quality exotic edible mushrooms. When appropriate capital can be raised for the scale of this project, we will return and embark upon the plan as set forth. A further challenge is manifest in the form of a process challenge: although ZERI's Namibia brewery project was a success, Mana Mushrooms has not yet duplicated the alternative method of substrate sterilization whereby CIP fluids from the brewery process render a substrate sufficiently sterile for successful mushroom cultivation with a profitable yield model relative to costs of production. Lab work continues in the pursuit of this goal.

The inputs for this system include organic grass clippings, spent brewer’s grains, coffee wastes from local businesses, and wood wastes from industrial processes.

Our outputs include King Oyster, Tree Oyster, Shiitake, Enoki, and Reishi mushrooms. Mushrooms will also be available for sale over the internet, at a slight premium to encourage local consumption and offset the emissions generated by shipment.

This list of species helps to inform our decisions when selecting species for cultivation. It provides a relatively comprehensive list of fungal species native to the Commonwealth. This document can also be found in the Links section.

Pennsylvania

In Pennsylvania, Mana Mushrooms is a co-applicant on a grant to implement an industrial ecology project with an industrial partner. This partnership represents an opportunity to use a different model than the one implemented at the community scale.

Millions of BTUs are wasted hourly due to inefficient traditional processes; Mana Mushrooms will help our industrial partner improve their resource efficiencies and recapture wasted heat for the otherwise costly, energy-intensive processes of heating the cultivation building(s) and pasteurizing the substrates.

Inspired by Natural Capitalism, we seek to help our partners reduce their consumption of Earth’s bounty, as we do not feel the manifest destiny approach to resources is a sustainable one.

Colombia

In Colombia, there is a women's cooperative implementing the ZERI Principles to cultivate mushrooms from waste. A nearby industrial partner provides coffee wastes, a high-value hardwood substrate material. The heat needs of the process are fulfilled with biofuels. The production capacity of the cooperative is larger than their local market can absorb, so we are in mid-stage development of a partnership to help them sell their produce in US markets.

The fable of The Smart Mushroom which originally sparked my interest in Mushrooms and ZERI, so this is a fitting step in the process of conducting business in this space. A portion of all profits generated from this joint venture will be donated to ZERI Foundation to help disseminate this important information.