Dear CrowdFarmer, my name is Jonathan Schraml and I am happy about your interest in mushrooms! I would like to tell you how I became a farmer for gourmet mushrooms. Due to various food intolerances, I can unfortunately hardly tolerate processed and conventionally produced food. Therefore, I started from an early age to eat consciously and to learn about the origin and production of my food. In my search for a healthy diet I came across cultivated mushrooms in my twenties. Besides working as a child educator at a special school, I started growing exotic mushrooms in my bathroom. The more time passed by, the more I got pulled into the topic. I became enthusiastic about the huge variety of mushrooms, which is largely unknown in Germany, the delicious aromas, the environmentally friendly production, but also the biology behind it. My first great love was the shiitake mushroom, which I not only find wonderfully aromatic, but also very stomach friendly. I immediately integrated the shiitake as a fixed component in my diet. I started spending more and more time with my mushroom experiments and increasingly supplied friends and relatives with exotic delicacies that were enthusiastically received. My friends Matthias and Philipp, whom I had infected with my love for mushrooms, were at that time in the process of reinventing themselves professionally and so we decided to turn our passion into a profession and to bring the gourmet varieties, which we had discovered in private, closer to other people. Matthias and I spent the first year converting the World War bunker that we had acquired into an efficient, sustainable and absolutely hygienic organic mushroom cultivation facility. Since this has been achieved and our mushrooms are finding an ever increasing market, our daily work has enormously diversified and, in addition to the administrative tasks, it's mainly characterised by physical labour. The introduction of fresh substrates, the spreading of used substrates, delivery journeys and the mushroom harvest in between are our main tasks besides the further development of our farm. Since the beginning of 2020 Philipp supports us in the areas of sales, marketing and customer service. Although all members of our team have very different professional backgrounds, we agree on the principles of our joint activities. We want to realize our ideal of value-based agriculture not naively but pragmatically. We are convinced that organic farming, social interaction, highest product quality, fair prices and economic success do not have to contradict each other. And we believe that in times of globally dwindling resources, sustainably cultivated mushrooms are an intelligent and tasty way to sensibly expand our diet. We are therefore very pleased to be able to offer our mushrooms via crowdfarming to quality-conscious customers who appreciate organic and sustainable cultivation.

The "Edelpilzerei" was founded in 2018 as a joint project of the mushroom friends Jonathan and Matthias. After some years of growing mushrooms as hobbyists they turned their passion into their profession and founded a mushroom farm with a slightly different approach in an old bunker on a site in a city called "Coswig Anh)" between romantic Elbe meadows, mistletoe covered black locust trees and fallow industrial buildings. Since mushroom cultivation takes up most of their time, they have been supported in sales, marketing and customer service by their friend Philipp since the beginning of 2020. In contrast to classical large-scale enterprises, in the "Edelpilzerei" we are "simply closer to the mushroom", i.e. real mushroom enthusiasts, who personally supervise the entire production process and harvest the mushrooms by hand. Our declared goal is to grow gourmet mushrooms with a high nutritional value and outstanding aroma and offer them to health-conscious gourmets at a fair price. We know that the world of mushrooms has much more to offer than just button mushrooms and we see it as our mission to inspire our customers with traditional but in these parts of the world hardly known mushroom varieties. Due to their valuable ingredients, our mushrooms are ideal for a varied diet and are also a clever alternative to meat dishes. Apart from their advantages in terms of ingredients, our mushroom production is also protecting the environment with an extremely resource-saving production method: per KG cultivated mushroom we use only approx. 1.8 l of water on average for each variety. By way of comparison: while a kilogram of tomatoes requires an average of about 180 litres of water globally, and a kilogram of lettuce requires about 130 litres, a kilogram of avocados uses about 1,000 litres. Moreover, our organic mushrooms grow without any chemical additives. In order to come a little closer to our ideal of a sustainable recycling economy, we will in future use the waste substrate blocks on our compost to produce valuable heating energy that can be used for the next harvest.