Resources for Mushroom Growers Morel Mushroom Cultivation
Morels are one tough mushroom to grow commercially! Two cultivation processes have been patented. The first process is based upon work by Ronald D. Ower, Gary Mills and James Malachowski, who were the first to produce morels in a controlled environment at San Francisco State University in 1982. The findings were published in Mycologia 74(1), Jan-Feb 1982. Still, at last report, no one, besides the inventors, has been able to produce morels by the instructions in the patent. Terry Farms opened a morel production facility in Auburn, Alabama with Mill's assistance and offered their products for a few years, producing up to almost 1,400 pounds per week, but closed down the operation in 1999. In 2005 Mills, formerly with Diversified Natural Products and now with Gourmet Mushrooms, Inc., began producing morels in Scottville, Michigan. While the operation was initially very profitable, the farm was hit with a severe bacterial infection in 2006. Mill's had been producing Morchella rufobrunnea derived from a morel originally collected in California. This is a yellow morel typically found in landscaped areas. For more information on this species, see this report from the July-September 2008 edition of Mycotaxon. Mills continues to work with Gourmet Mushrooms in efforts to make morel production commercially viable.
The second patented process was invented by Stuart C. Miller. This process involves outdoor cultivation of inoculated tress under which the morels will fruit if the trees are killed. The process is generally described at morelfarms.com.
Hao Tan, et al, published an article in Environmental Microbiology on July 17, 2019 titled Multi-iomic analyses of exogenous nutrient bag decomposition by the black morel Morchella importuna reveal sustained carbon acquisition and transferring. It explains how morels use bags of nutrients. The supplementary material provides a lot of background information including the process researchers used to grow the morels. Professor Tan told us, "We welcome farmers, technicians, biotechnological engineers and scientists all around the world to replicate this method in their countries and harvest their own morels. The "M. importuna SCYDJ1-A1" is not the only variety that can fruit under artificial cultivation. To our knowledge, this method is working on any strains of M.importuna, M.sextelata or M.eximia which can be easily obtained from the wild. Do remember, the method is not working on M.esculenta."
Some
suppliers sell morel spawn with instructions for creating a small outdoor patch. This works, sometimes, but it is certainly not a sure thing and don't expect commercial yields.
Chinese growers have had some success with morels, but it is still difficult to produce consistent commercial quantities economically. Professor John Pecchia and Grad Student Siyi Ge of Penn State University wrote up a short description of the Chinese process after visiting a morel industry conference in Songzi City in March of 2017.
Terry Farms purchased the patents originally held by Neogen in 1994 and, in 2005, Diversified Natural Products began producing morels in Michigan using the patents. Gourmet Mushrooms, Inc. took over that operation in 2015. At last report they were not producing morels while they tried to find a way to make the process profitable. The process is quite complicated. The patents involved are:
In 2005, Stewart C. Miller patented a process for growing morels that involves inoculating tree seedlings with morel mycelium, allowing the mycelium to grow, then killing the seedlings to induce the morels to fruit. Read all about it in:
In 2013, the Soil and Fertilizer Institute at Sichuan Academy of Agricultural Sciences in China began large scale demonstrations of a cultivation technique that seems to work well with a specific strains of Morchella importuna and Morchella sextelata. A summary of the process, with photos, is available at wsmbmp.org/Bol13/5.html. Further information, in Chinese, may be found in the May 2015 issue of the journal Sichuan Agricultural Science and Technology. There it is reported that yields have reached as much as 6800 pounds per acre. These species are grown using a specially prepared spawn that is cased with soil. Environmental conditions are tightly controlled. After inoculating the beds in October though December, the morels fruit from March to May. Production acreages have increased dramatically in the Sichuan area since 2013.
There are lots of different species of morels and only a few have actually been cultivated. If you are going to start with a wild morel you will need to learn all you can about them. The U.S. Forest Service published a book entitled "Ecology and Management of Morels Harvested From the Forests of Western North America." You can download it in four parts:
This video shows how to grow morels outdoors using the spore-slurry method. These are yellow/blond morels, perhaps Morchella rufobrunnea. They are commonly found in mulch and do not seem to require an association with trees.
This video shows a technique used by commercial morel growers in China. Unfortunately the video doesn't reveal the species or strain of morel being grown, the materials used in the spawn bags, the materials used in the greenhouse substrate or the planting/inoculation process. Based on the Pecchia/Ge report provided above, 95% of commercially grown morels in China are M. importuna, so that's probably the species used here. The same report discusses other steps in the process that are not illustrated in this video.