Skip the grind. Keep the yield.

You already know where the hours go: cleaning, mixing, cooking, cooling, inoculating, incubating, cleaning again.

When Cornell surveyed 139 specialty growers, the top three barriers to growing the business were labor, production facilities, and growing output to meet demand. Production knowledge came last. Nearly two thirds already had more demand than they could supply.

The ceiling mostly isn't sales, and it isn't know-how. It's the hours and the square footage that go into making blocks. Cornell also costed five indoor farms: making blocks on site, labor was about 80% of what a block cost them; buying them in, about 42%.

That's the part we're building around.

A ready-to-fruit block you buy instead of make. Prep hours go back into growing and selling. Prep space becomes fruiting space.

Right now we're finishing development testing, building the first prototypes of the machinery, working through National Science Foundation funding, and talking to growers so that what gets built is grounded in what the industry actually needs rather than in what we assume it needs.

Three things at once.

A patent-pending method that redesigns the prep process, aiming to cost less than making blocks yourself once your own hours are counted. It comes out of about five years of testing and a technical plan I wrote that runs about 470 pages and draws on more than 500 sources. Patent pending: provisional filed July 2026. I'm deep in development testing now, grounding the yield and cost estimates before I put any of them in front of a grower.

Custom machinery. Several steps in substrate prep have no good equipment behind them, so they get done by hand. Those machines are designed, and some of them are already prototyped.

Scale. Making blocks a thousand at a time costs less per block than making them a hundred at a time. Most farms that make their own are working a batch at a time, on equipment sized for a batch.

In 2020 I worked out what nineteen different mushrooms would cost to grow and what each one would sell for. I was trying to answer one question: could gourmet mushrooms ever be cheap?

The answer was that the mushroom is never the expensive part. The block is.

About five years of hands-on testing since then. I restarted the mycology club at Cal Poly and ran it for two years, built a flow hood, a fruiting chamber, a small lab and a greenhouse, and ran roughly thirty of my own trials on getting substrate colonized without the usual prep. A good number of them didn't work.

Before this, my work was contamination control in aerospace, on hypergolic propulsion systems, where something that isn't clean enough doesn't fail politely. Keeping a process clean at volume is the same problem here, at a different scale and at a price a farm can pay.

There's a written technical plan behind all of it: about 470 pages drawing on more than 500 sources, and a bench campaign running now. Patent pending — provisional filed July 2026. Rocky Mountain Mushroom Farm LLC is a Colorado company, formed 2025.

I'm Joey Hammond. I've walked other people's farms, watched their prep, timed it, and cost-modelled their lines against a bought-in block.

So if you grow commercially, I'd genuinely like to hear how your substrate works today: what it costs you, what it costs you in time, and what would have to be true before you'd swap any of it out.