Monterey Mushroom Facility Tour

What is Monterey?

I bet you must see it in the supermarket!

 

Today, our course is to visit this big mushroom factory. Cool!

For food safety issue, everyone is required to wear a hair net, toes covered shoes, no shorts,bno jewelry, no stuff in the pocket.

1. This machine transport the compost the straw mixture with the chicken poop and urea from outside into the mushroom growth chamber.

2. The environmental factors like temperature, light, humidity are monitored by the computer, but also needs people to check several times every day. 

 3. A pile of wooden trays containing compost inoculated with mushroom mycelium in the growth room with optimal temperature and high humidity.

Wooden trays contained sanitized compost

Packaged millet seeds pre-inoculated with mycelium

Compost with inoculated mycelium

Mushroom begins to grow on the nutritious compost

4. When the mushroom grow to certain size, they will be transported to other growth room set with the optimal environmental factors. The instructor said they will transport the whole pile of wooden tray at one time. How do they make it? I am really curious about this.

5. At last, they are transported into the growth room waiting for harvesting. 

Clean environmental

What a lovely mushroom!

The worker is selecting the mushroom with high quality and 

separate then into different colored plastic basket, indicating the different quality levels.

They indeed discard the mushroom with bad quality!!

6. The environment needs to be very clean, but fungicide is the last thing used to kill pathogens.

If there is contamination in the compost, the workers will use salt to cover the contaminated area.

7. At last, I know how do they transport the whole pile of wooden tray at one time!! They use this machine (sorry! I forgot the name...). Lorna told me that the drivers need special driver license to operate on this machine for this may hurt people because of wrong operations. Wow! He is very proficient in operating the machine! It is really cool!!

Discussion: 

Monterey, established in 1971, is the country's largest maker of mushrooms. It is headquartered in Watsonville, California. They are selling all kinds of mushrooms. After this tour, I feel safer to eat there mushroom. 

  

 

Without this great opportunity, I bet I will never imagine how does the industry produce the mushroom! Thanks to the lab course. Hope it will be custom for this class for the students love it so much!

Oh, my God! It is so fresh!! 

I promise this is the first time for me to each raw mushroom!!