Cordyceps Militaris Commercial Bag Production Grain Media Trials V Rice Part 1 Unicorn Horizontal

We know how it is to be a certifiably insane mushroom farmer: No sleep, always on the grind and constantly running experiments but also trying to participate in life. Oh joy!

I try to grow with local and/or organic media as much as I can but finding affordable 50lb bags of brown rice let alone organic is impossible!! So I set out on this experiment to trial different organic grains for fruiting Cordyceps militaris that I could find affordably in my area of SW Virginia.

Last year I tried to use oats because I heard about it on the mycowizards community form but didn’t have good results but it was at the end of the winter and our lab was getting pretty hot so maybe that hurt the experiment and I plan on revisiting oats again now that we have a DIY cool bot in our lab and can keep it under 65 degrees.

This experiment focused on wheat, sorghum (Milo), Japanese millet and rice as our control. I had a vacation that landed right when I should have been harvesting and so the harvest was not ideal but should be fine for the sake of the experiment. I also got our DIY coolbot setup as the experiment was ending and I think some bags had heat stress because of lab temperature swings.
I used wheat because I’ve found a journal article that said wheat was the best for spawn production, but that was about the extent that I could find on using different grains for Cordyceps production. Wheat turned out to be the worst of all the grains for fruiting and combinations or smaller grains seemed to be the best.
I will be making a part 2 of this experiment that goes over the data collected through harvesting, current experiments and further analysis.
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