Hello everyone! First, please let me say that our project would never exist without the support from several people within our little company and also our customers, who have been enjoying great food for more than 5 seasons. Thank you! Now please let me share my little story. My name is Dalibor Sýkorovský. I graduated from the Faculty of Tropical Agriculture at the University of Life Sciences in Prague with a master's degree and I started the project True Shiitake in 2015. Since I was a little kid I had a really close connection with nature, which started probably in the deserts of Syria, where I spent about 6 years of my childhood, running around chasing geckos and agamas. Then growing up in Prague, I had my snakes and frogs as pets and later moved to orchids. However, the lack of knowledge and skills didn't get me very far. As a teenager I started to really get into fly fishing, which has been my great passion ever since. Throughout the university studies, me and my wife (we know each other since we were 15 ;)) had the great privilege to travel and work in various places and, driven by hunger for exploration, we’ve been able to explore some of the most fascinating ecosystems remaining on this planet, from deep cloud forest of the Pacific Rim to the highlands with its remaining Atlantic forest. As time was flying, it was about time to settle and start taking the adulthood life a little more seriously so we moved back to our home town in Prague. On one of my last trips I had a chance to help my great friend starting his log grown shiitake operation on the East Coast of the United States. Work wasn't easy, but I sensed that there is meaning in drilling logs, but I still didn’t understand. I was looking at my future, how to make myself useful to people and to nature as well. An ambitious and unique wish these days, but 2015 still seems to me like a year of many good ideas, so I gave it a shot. I remember I thought of myself as well educated in the field, a hard working, disciplined person so what could go wrong? Well, life is interesting, full of surprises and many things are not as they seem. Briefly summarized our project faced and is still facing plenty of challenges. For me the major factor is connecting the conservative forestry industry with the food industry. Other challenges are the amount of bureaucracy, regulations and limitations we are facing. We’ve learned to approach this as a challenge that we need to overcome. I was obviously wrong on 99 percent of things, but I was very right about one: making food out of raw wood is a part of our decent future on this planet. I am really thankful CrowdFarming is giving us a chance to connect us with people and customers, which look at the world in similar ways, cherishing their food and purchasing it from people producing it. Our main goal is to incorporate shiitake cultivation into forestry. We would like to selectively cut trees, grow shiitakes and then spend substrate incorporated in forest biomass, which would enhance the biomass' overall productivity, increase resistance to upcoming climate changes and lock several tons of carbon by doing it! Ambitious again, but possibly we can make it happen. Thank you for reading this and I hope you enjoy our product.

Our farm is named after the project True Shiitake farm. Me (Dalibor) and my business partner at the time started it in 2015. We moved into a post-apocalyptic looking structure originally used for seed storage for the local farms. It took us about a season to climb the basic learning curve and in 2018 me and my partner went separate ways. I ended up on the farm by myself with my wife Maja and our daughter Antonia. It took us about 2 seasons to get the farm going properly and since 2020 we have Michael helping us getting larger and working smarter every year. The farm is located in Central Bohemia close to the village Karany, surrounded by a forest conservation area. With so much nature in the neighborhood we live next door to a lot of animals. We often get visited by them on our farm and we enjoy daily encounters with lizards and snakes sunbathing in the morning and larger mammals hanging around in the late afternoon. Lately we encountered quite a few stag-beetles, whose larvaes really enjoyed our few old logs lying around, because their only source of food is white root-fungus which shiitake belongs to. The area is mostly uninhabited due to a large protected area which is the main source of drinking water for Prague. The water, which comes from the river Jizera, is cleaned through the natural soil condition. While we are located at the edge of this conservation area, our other “neighbor” is the small village Karany. A bit further away and divided by the river Elbe, the largest river in our country, you already find the suburbs of Prague. Our goal is to use the traditional natural method to grow delicious shiitake mushrooms from oak wood, all organic and sustainable. The method of using the natural sterility of the substrate comes from Japan and enables us to produce our shiitake completely without pesticides. In Japan the cut logs have been placed in areas of natural occurrence of the shiitake mushrooms, scratched and left for the shiitake spores to get in. However, the precision and predictability of the technique has not been very high - still worthwhile, since it was the only way to get the precious mushrooms. About 40 years ago, inoculation techniques developed and that was the first opportunity to develop a meaningful market production around the globe. The cultivation of mushrooms enters as an intermediate step in the production of firewood. This means that it is possible to produce high quality food for several years that grows on our oak logs and then the wood can still be used as fuel. The cultivation system also allows us to combine intensive and extensive farming in a unique way. On a few hundred square meters we are able to produce up to 30 times more protein than growing cattle. To do this, we need about 70 times less water. Because of these fundamental aspects, which are very important for a sustainable way of life on this planet, we would like to introduce the cultivation of shiitake mushrooms into our modern society.