Hawaii has year-round growing conditions and abundant agricultural land, yet it still imports more than 85% of its food. More than 2.3 million pounds of Agaricus mushrooms, a mushroom family that includes Portobello and Crimini, were imported each year in 2006 and 2007. Currently, these mushrooms are not produced in Hawaii. Increasing the production of locally grown food products would not only reduce the state of Hawaii's carbon footprint, it would minimize the dependency on imported food, and promote sustainable long-term solutions for Hawaii's small and mid-size farms/food producers. OCR is committed to bringing the cultivation of Agaricus mushrooms to small farms in Hawaii. However, an Agaricus mushroom industry in Hawaii is not economically feasible until local materials can be substituted for conventional substrate materials currently used in mainland mushroom production. It is also important to determine whether a renewable material can be substituted in any proportion for peat, which is the current (non-renewable) "gold standard" for mushroom casing. Expansion by OCR into mushroom cultivation, using local materials, is a logical extension of OCR's current recycling efforts, as green wastes compose a substantial portion of municipal wastes in Hawaiian landfills. This Agaricus mushroom cultivation project has the potential for providing small and mid-sized farms with an income stream while diversifying their year-round crop base regardless of what else they are producing. It will allow them to address a valuable high-demand local mushroom market with the freshest-possible products and will introduce an entirely new crop into Hawaii's agricultural industry. It will also have a positive impact on the environment as a recycling activity, and will provide farmers with spent mushroom compost to use as a soil amendment for their existing field crops. OCR's success with this USDA project will serve as a model for additional innovative recycling projects nationwide, and should lead to other high-value agricultural applications for small and mid-sized farms. The potential benefits are substantial if local sources for substrate and casing can be developed: Agaricus mushroom cultivation would be a new farming industry for Hawaii, one that could reduce Hawaii's imported food dependency. Agaricus mushrooms are highly perishable and sensitive to heat; therefore, they have to be flown in and kept refrigerated before consumption. A domestic source of fresh Agaricus mushrooms would reduce imported fuel dependency for Hawaii's population of over 1.4 million, and provide a source of mushrooms for its influx of tourists. Hawaiian production of Agaricus mushrooms would contribute to Hawaii's economic diversification at a time when it is even more important to think about energy conservation and protection of the environment. OBJECTIVES: Hawaii enjoys year-round growing conditions yet still imports more than eighty five percent of its food and has less than a seven day supply of food in stores at any given time. Increasing production of locally grown food products would reduce the state's carbon footprint, decrease its dependence on imported food, and promote sustainable long-term crop solutions in crop cultivation for Hawaii's small and mid-size farms, which are facing serious and increasing challenges. Those challenges include pressure from urbanization/developers and rising production/energy costs. Hawaii's small and mid-sized farms, the backbone of the state's agriculture, clearly need the opportunity to produce new, high-value crops that require the smallest possible amount of land and minimal inputs. Mushrooms could be one of those crops. More than 2.3 million pounds of Agaricus mushrooms, including high-value Portobello and Crimini mushrooms, are imported into Hawaii annually, demonstrating a major market demand even at the very high imported prices. Yet Hawaiian farms do not produce mushrooms, as the conventional growing materials for mushrooms are not available in Hawaii and are too expensive to be imported. Consequently, the overall goal of Oahu Community Recycling's (OCR's) multi-phase SBIR project is to prototype, validate, and commercialize a wholesale mushroom substrate/casing production and distribution system that will benefit small and mid-sized Hawaiian farms, utilizing local substrate and renewable casing media (in combination with traditional media, i.e., peat) to enable local mushroom cultivation. The Phase I project demonstrated the feasibility of producing the media materials needed to grow the new crop on an R&D scale. The Phase II project is focused on scaling those results up to a prototype/demonstration farming operation. We believe this USDA SBIR project focused on Agaricus mushroom cultivation in Hawaii will provide small and mid-sized farms with an important income stream while diversifying their year-round crop base. APPROACH: To achieve our objectives in Phase II, OCR will develop scale-up production processes based upon conventional mushroom growing operations, utilizing our local substrate and "hybrid" (peat and coconut coir) casing materials. OCR will utilize the most current mushroom research and proven technologies in its facility. The facility will integrate state-of-the-art research on mushroom crop management, pest and disease control, and facilities engineering. Utilizing the proven technologies will prevent OCR from having to "reinvent the wheel" for basic and conventional mushroom cultivation techniques that can be transferred to OCR's facility. Though the Agricultural Statistics Board, NASS, USDA published in August 2008 statistics that show commercial mushroom growers yield on average 5.67 pounds per square foot, we do not believe that this is a reasonable Phase II goal, because commercial growers work at larger scale and have optimized their processes (usually over several years). The reasonable benchmark to achieve the objective of "effective and high-quality Agaricus mushroom production" is this 70% bioefficiency measurement. We do not expect to reach this target in the first grow cycle, and understand the importance of close monitoring of the entire composting cycle, since there are only 20-24 cycles during the entire 2-year Phase II project period. As a conservative goal, we expect to meet this 70% bioefficiency during the fourth cycle and maintain it throughout the rest of the project. Since OCR will employ similar cultivation technology and equipment that has been used for many years by mushroom growers, we are confident that environmental and pest issues related to scaled-up production has already been handled. OCR considers it important to provide a valuable service to affiliate farmers in supply of all of the materials necessary for farmers to grow mushrooms for retail sale. Because of this affiliate relationship, OCR will need to carefully evaluate the economic relationship between its own retail sales, and wholesale sales to farmers. We will attempt to develop a model of business growth that will enable both OCR and farmers to benefit economically from the business relationship, and to create sustainable business operations for both. In addition to these informal farmer discussions, if time permits, OCR will conducting informal surveys of potential buyers to determine pricing options, pricing acceptance from retailers and restaurants, and other product specifications such as bulk sales and frequency of deliveries. These variables would be entered into an economic pricing model
