00:00There's something strangely beautiful about growing mushrooms.
00:09But despite the exotic nature of this urban farm in Logan in South East Queensland, Simon
00:17Tang is on a mission to make all parts of his business homegrown.
00:23We probably produce like from two to three times every week, including like king oyster
00:29mushroom and shiitake mushrooms.
00:31Now we have three farms, one farm growing oyster mushroom, one farm growing like shiitake
00:37mushroom, another farm more like a factory in Bundaberg.
00:42It's not the mushrooms themselves being produced here in Bundaberg, but rather the special material
00:48required to grow premium exotic mushrooms.
00:52That's what prompted Simon Tang to settle on Bundy as the site for this factory.
00:57The key ingredient in this mushroom substrate comes from sugarcane processing.
01:02So where better to set up a manufacturing hub than the sugar city?
01:07He sent me an email asking about growing mushrooms from the gas, are you interested in supplying
01:12some?
01:13So we went, yep, no worries.
01:14We had some spare.
01:15The gas is the by-product after we squeeze out all the sugar juice out of it.
01:20It's about 45% moisture so we use that in our boilers to produce the steam which runs the
01:25whole process.
01:27Using sugarcane bagasse to grow mushrooms is definitely a little further outside of the
01:33ordinary.
01:34Funding from the Federal Government and research partnerships between several universities have
01:39all helped to grow the fledgling industry to this point.
01:43Researchers have led extensive mushroom growing trials and spent time cultivating mushroom spores
01:50and developing different recipes using the sugarcane bagasse.
01:54Once the substrate bags are composed, they're injected with the mushroom spores and then stored
02:00in incubation rooms for a couple of weeks.
02:03When they first started out growing the oyster mushrooms using the sugarcane bagasse, they
02:09were only harvesting about 50 grams per grow bag.
02:13Over time they've refined the process and now they're harvesting up to 300 grams using the
02:19bagasse as the growing medium.
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