Hi my name is Asa Cauvel and I am crowd sourcing for a food production business. I learned how to grow gourmet mushrooms and researched the topic of mycology on my own for a couple of years. My degree in psychology didn't go anywhere, but I used the research skills I gained in college to teach myself how to grow mushrooms through the literature that exists on the subject and absorbed as much information on the topic as I could. I can grow and am currently growing lion's mane mushrooms (the ones that help with brain health), blue oyster mushrooms, gold oyster mushrooms, and enoki mushrooms. These are diabetic friendly non-processed whole foods that are not only gourmet but also very healthful. Also the process of turning discarded wood waste into food is a kind of bioalchemy that just seems like the right thing to do in terms of ecology. The thing that excites me about mushrooms is actually really personal, because my wife has had Type 2 Diabetes since she was 22 and we have been on a journey of sending her diabetes into remission since we met. She asked me to help her and one of the things we ended up finding, was the importance of mushrooms in the diet as a means of treating diabetes. From Dr. Sarah Hallberg (a noted diabetes expert who has gotten various awards from her home state for her work on the topic) we learned that diabetes is essential a carbohydrate intolerance and a type of processed food disease. Since mushrooms are so low on the gylcemic index, they're a safe food for diabetics. Not only that, but some of them have medicinal properties that actually help treat diabetes and lead to lower resting sugars. "Let food be thy medicine" came to mind when I learned this - and its been working. With her doctor's blessing, she has been medication-free since last month. She's gone from metformin to lantus insulin to trulicity, and now she is medication free and manages her diabetes with diet and excersize - and we incorporate a lot of mushrooms in her diet. The food that I'm growing can really help people, both as an alternative to the foods that harm people and as a form of treatment (e.g. the lion's mane are considered to be both a medicinal and gourmet mushroom with a wide variety of benefits not limited to diabetes). Just by the principal of oppertunity cost, these can help people (i.e. if they eat the lion's mane I grow, they're not eating some type of processed food instead for at least that meal). So here's the deal ... I live in Bradford PA ... its a small right wing oil town filled with processed food ... there's a lot of people who are obese and who struggle with diabetes here ... the community is sick from the processed food that's a staple in everyone's diets ... so my idea is to provide an alteranitive food source (i.e. gourmet mushrooms such as blue oyster, gold oyster, and lion's mane) and make them available to the community via the local farmer's market. I want to grow an excessive amount of mushrooms and make them available to my community. I've already grown some batches ... and the mycelium (the roots of the mushroom for a botanical analogy) expands at an exponential rate ... so this can really take of ... but I'm at the flatline before the spike in terms of exponetial growth because I lack the financial means as an average person in Appalacia (third poorest region in the US) ... so I need some help. I already have all the equipment (e.g. lamibar flow hood, pressure canner, and general tools/containers) and I've found free sourcing for bulk substrate (e.g. coffee grounds, sawdust, and etc.) so I can convert free agricultural waste into food ... the only thing I actually need (and need a lot of) is grainspawn. So that's why I made this LFEBridge ... to fundraise money for grainspawn for the mushroom business that I'm trying to start to work myself out of poverty. The grainspawn that I get are these really big bags of a very specific kind of bird seed that I buy locally at The Feedery over on Chestnut Street, and it runs $60 for a giant bag of it. All I really need right now is one more big bag of bird seed ... but I set the goal to $1,000 because the more funds I have, the faster I can grow and expand my mycelium in order to generate more mushrooms for more people faster. That's about what it would take to fully utilize my property and growing space, so that's why that's the goal ... but for the next batch, I only really need $60. So if you want to see more mushrooms in Bradford, then help fund my gourmet mushroom business. TL;DR I'm just some guy from a small town trying to introduce some health food into the area (because I've seen what the opposite kind of food has been doing to folks and it bothers me) that can be grown on mostly agricultural waste (woodchips, straw, and coffee grounds) but I need more bird seed for the next batch. $60 would cover the next bag of bird seed and is really all I need because I have everything else in terms of equipment, genetics, and materials ... but $1,000 would get me enough bird seed / grain spawn to maximize my property in order to fully utilize my growing space to maximum efficency to really kickstart this business into something substantial.
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