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 demand.1

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. 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. Prep hours go back into growing and selling. Prep space becomes fruiting space.

The target is to cost less than making your own once your own hours are in the number. That qualifier is the whole claim, and I won't put a figure on it until the bench work says what the figure is.

To be clear about what I want and what I don't: the part I'd take off your plate is the part that gets cheaper the bigger it gets, which is making the block. Fruiting, packing and selling are local problems, and they stay yours.

Right now I'm finishing development testing, building the first prototypes of the machinery, working through National Science Foundation funding, and talking to growers so that what gets built is grounded in what the industry actually needs rather than in what I assume it needs.

Three things at once.

A patent-pending method that redesigns how a block gets made. I got into the microbiology side of this early and never really got back out - specifically mycelial enzymatic expression, which is a fancy way of saying the fungus already does a lot of the work itself if you set things up right, so a farm ends up paying in labor and process time for what the biology would do on its own. I spent about five years chasing that, and somewhere in there it turned into a plan that runs 470 pages with more than 500 sources behind it. The method that came out of it is patent pending, filed July 2026. I'm finishing up development tests now to pin down what the yield and the cost actually are, because I'd rather hand you a real number than a hopeful one.

Custom machinery. Several steps in substrate prep have no good equipment behind them, so they get done by hand. My work before this was contamination control in aerospace, on hypergolic propulsion systems, where a process that isn't clean enough doesn't fail politely. I'm using that background to design machinery that is cheap to build, keeps contamination out, and scales. Those machines are designed, and some of them are already prototyped.

Scale. Making blocks a thousand at a time costs less per block than making them a hundred at a time. Most farms that make their own are working a batch at a time, on equipment sized for a batch.2