Mushroom farming

Entrepreneur

About Me

My name is Esther. I live in Juja. I started my business of mushroom farming after I saw a young man on the television explaining the whole process step by step. That was back in 2014. From there I was hooked, I could not think of anything else but mushrooms.

Kenya requires 1200 tons of mushrooms per year yet we only produce 500 tons. So I see great potential in mushroom farming.

Business went down when Covid came. I hade to cut totally the quantity of production and also had to cut down the number of labourers.

My Business

Due to Covid, mushroom market was affected since my main market was the hotel industry. In Kenya, most of our mushrooms are imported, we are yet to be able to meet the market demand so I saw it as a great business opportunity.

I was only doing oyster farming then and my plans on expansion to add button mushroom to my farm came to a halt. Now that things are back to normal, I wish to expand to grow both oyster and button mushrooms.

The cost of growing oyster is much friendly than button. Due to the materials required and the process itself. With oyster, depending on quantity of bags it may take at most a week to have ready bags. With button it takes a month for the substrate to be ready to use.

My typical cost for growing mushroom can be between 35-50K if you have an established business. For button, which I wish to grow is between 200-250K.
Part of my profit I put it back into my business, some into investing and home improvement.

Project Proposal

With the money I will receive, I will add to buy more spawn (seeds). I will be able to increase my number of mushroom bags.
This is an added advantage because I will be able to make more bags of mushrooms and increase my return.

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