Robot wrote:
How could one go about producing say 50 kg of dried shrooms per month.
Even if it were legal it would probably be outdated to do so. Dried mushrooms are of lower quality than fresh. And the freshest mushrooms are obtained when the end user is growing him/herself. If quality is among your concerns I would inoculate 10,000 PF TEK style halfpint whiskyglasses, vacuum seal each of them and tell the customers to remove the seal 4-6 weeks before they need the mushrooms. Air will enter the substrate (filtered through the dry contaminant barrier on top), spores will germinate and mushrooms will grow 'in vitro'. Totally maintenance free.
No autoclave - no peroxide - and the vacuum sealed glasses do not look suspicious at all (in most places on this planet they are not even illegal). But you probably need some professional mixing equipment for the substrate and a soda pop factory setup for the inoculation.
In the third edition of the mushroom cultivator's bible Growing Gourmet and MedicinalMush rooms (TEN SPEED PRESS, 2000), author PAUL STAMETS explains:
The ultimate shortcut for culturing mushrooms is via spore mass/liquid-inoculation directly into fruiting substrates (p. 133). Bottle culture is an effective means for growing a variety of gourmet and medicinal mushrooms on sterilized substrates. Currently, Asian growers have adapted bottle culture, originally designed for the easy cropping of Enoki mushrooms (Flammulina velutipes), to the cultivation of many other gourmet and medicinal mushrooms, including Lion's Mane (Hericium erinaceus, Buna-shimeji (Hypsizygus tessulatzto, Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum), Wood Ears (Auricularia polytricha), and some varieties of Oyster mushrooms. The advantage of bottle culture is that the process can be highly compartmentalized and easily incorporated into the many high-speed production systems adapted from other industries. With the natural evolution of techniques, Asian cultivators have replaced bottles with similarly shaped, cylindrical bags. Many growers in Thailand, Taiwan, andjapan prefer this hybrid method. Liquid-inoculation of sterilized, supplemented medium allows for inoculation methods resembling the high-production systems seen in a soda pop factory. With reengineering, such high-speed assembly-line machinery could be retrofitted for commercial bottle and bag cultivation. (pp. 191-193)