Skip the grind. Keep the yield.

You already know where the hours go: cleaning, mixing, cooking, cooling, inoculating, incubating, cleaning again.

When Cornell surveyed 139 specialty growers, the top three barriers to growing the business were labor, production facilities, and growing output to meet demand1 — so the ceiling isn't sales, and it's not know-how. It's the hours and the square footage that go into making blocks. Cornell costed five indoor farms and found the same thing in the accounts: on the farms making their own blocks, 80% of what they spent went to labor and 20% to materials, while on the farms buying blocks ready to fruit labor dropped to 42%.2 That's the part I'm aiming to build around.

A ready-to-fruit block you buy instead of make. Hours go back into growing and selling, and more square footage can go towards fruiting.

A brewery doesn't malt its own barley, a bakery doesn't mill its own flour. Farmers buy one-year-old asparagus crowns, they don't sow them from seed. Fruiting, packing and selling will always be local problems — and they will always rely on local mushroom farms — but the target is to cost less than making your own, including materials and labor. Right now I'm finishing development testing, building the first prototypes of the machinery, and working through National Science Foundation funding.

The leverage points that are driving the production cost down.

Scale. Making blocks a thousand at a time costs less per block than making them a hundred at a time. A farm that focuses ONLY on substrate prep can specialize and increase batch volume.2

Custom machinery. Several steps in substrate prep have no good equipment behind them, so they get done by hand. Coming from a background in contamination control for hypergolic propulsion systems I learned how to make machinery that's custom, cheap, leak (and contam) tight, and easy to clean. These machines across the prep line, in their current state, range from drafted mechanisms to mature prototypes.

A patent-pending method that redesigns the prep process to cut cost and raise the quality of the block. It comes out of about five years of testing and a research paper I wrote on microbiology and mycelial enzymatic expression that runs about 470 pages and draws on more than 500 sources in mycology and microbiology. Patent pending: provisional filed July 2026. I'm deep in development testing now, grounding the yield and cost numbers now.