Our current projects involve the utilization of farmed White Oak trees used to produce lumber in the local area.
The treetops go to waste in the woods, however, we recycle these tops by inoculating them with the hard wood decomposing fungus Lentinula edodes, more commonly know as the Shiitake mushroom.
Not only is the Shiitake considered a gourmet food; it produces a medicinal compound called lentin.
This biochemical lentin, or lentinan, is a polysaccharide-based molecule found to inhibit HIV function and the proliferation of cancer cells.
More recently Shiitake extracts have been popularized as an additive to skin care creams.
Many new strains of this mushroom are used to inoculate sawdust/woodchip based hardwood substrates with increasingly great results.
However, Oak log grown Shiitakes are of a much higher quality.
Once hardwood trees are farmed they are brought to local sawmills for processing into lumber.
This generates large amounts of hardwood sawdust creating an environmental hazard.
Currently there is not many profitable ways to recycle this waste-by product.
It is used to make wood fuel pellets or in some cases used to create particleboard.
Most of this waste usually ends up piled into large mounds. This wastes space and is toxic to the environment.
Our solution to this is to decompose the sawdust using a hardwood parasite called Ganoderma lucidum.
This fungal organism is more commonly know as Reishi, Mannentake, Ling Chi or Ling Zhi.
It is very fast decomposer of harwood referred to as a white rot fungus.
We want to analyze the left over used sawdust substrate, or white rot, as a substitute animal feed.
