Growing mushroom over the years

Growing mushrooms has been a very fulfilling activity over the years. I started growing mushrooms as a fun thing, primarily stemming from the love of eating mushrooms, but soon it developed into a couple of important things.

For me, there was a lot of fascination in just seeing how life grows so rapidly in front of your eyes. Seeing a mushroom grow has captivated me since I first saw it and still has the same effect on me. Today, I feel this aspect of mushrooms has become the most important aspect of it.

Over the course of 10 years, I used mushroom farming as a means to educate people/government about creating a community-based social business model that can provide livelihoods to farmers, provide means to reuse organic waste, and provide a low-cost protein alternative. (I will be attaching a PDF to the Khoombi for anyone interested in exploring that idea.)

I used it as a means to gift family and friends something real and unique. I also used mushrooms in visual arts masters to demonstrate how soil and natural materials constitute life, unlike other non-organic industrial materials, and this aspect is unique.

We did our first mushroom farming venture in 2011, perhaps, and we sold in stores in Lahore, including Jalal Sons. I feel it was a very good business back then, and we should have stuck to it, which we did not. However, it still is a good business, especially around gourmet/exotic/medicinal mushrooms.

This post can be useful for people trying to look at mushrooms in a number of ways, like I did. Firstly, mushrooms are just a fun food to grow without any land, using waste material. There are many videos available on the internet about how to grow oyster mushrooms, which are the easiest mushrooms to grow.

Mushrooms require a special kind of growing medium called spawn, which can be thought of as microscopic seeds. I can leave the names of two vendors I have been buying spawn from; they are good people and can guide you in growing your first mushroom crop.

Community Based Mushroom Farming concept. Project Khoombi

Community Based Mushroom Farming concept. Project Khoombi


I will be attaching a business proposal document that we had submitted to the University of Oxford back in 2011, which we were told was perhaps the best document received among the submissions. Since it has not been updated since 2011, it is not only going to be outdated but could likely include content that might not make sense. Excuse us for that; however, I think it could still help you think and provide a foundation to base your future work on.

I think there is enough information available on internet today to anyone who seriously wants to take this project up, either for personal or commercial purposes. For People in social organization, NGOs or Government, I would be happy to connect them with people, resources and plans to execute this project bigger scale.

How the model is going to scale over time.

Resources For Download

Spawn Vendors
Rehan Qadeer 03108303083
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rehanqadeer/?originalSubdomain=pk