Creating the optimum conditions for mushroom cultivation are a challenge. The team of rotterzwam presents its latest innovation. Our climate wall makes finishing your mushroom growing room designs a piece of cake. Back in 2014, we published an open-source design for the climatisation of a mushroom fruiting room. The design helped many beginning mushroom farmers to design their own growing room. In 2019 we used that same growing room design to construct our new farm. But we needed an even better version. We wanted the essence of mushroom cultiva ..read more

During the summer months, we have been working with our network to make our online mushroom training more accessible. We did this by adding two more languages to our already extensive database of foreign languages. Module 0, the training for the beginning urban mushroom farmer is given in English and already had, English, Dutch and German subtitles. We are pleased to inform you that we now also offer Spanish and Portuguese subtitles. We hope these additional languages help to inspire a bigger audience to recycle locally available organic material into mushrooms and eventually start a small mus ..read more

The question we are asked the most is. "How much money do you need to start a mushroom farm?" The question behind the questions is: "How to start profitable mushroom farming on a budget?" We have been struggling for years to find the answer, but we think we finally can give it to you! In this blog post, we are going to share a five-step plan to start profitable mushroom farming on a budget. We wrote before on how we gradually build our mushroom farming business plan. It evolved over time. Based on the knowledge of more than eight years of mushroom farming, we ..read more

I'm not a digital oriented person. I can clearly remember when Google launched maps and I was thinking: "Who needs a digital map?" How wrong I was..... I joined Facebook even before I started rotterzwam. I was on it only for business reasons. I saw the potential in that platform and it's ability to connect you to your target audience. I also remember the first time when pages I liked, no longer appeared in my timeline.... Instead I saw the boring chatter of people I didn't care about. Why was Facebook not showing me the suff I liked and wanted to hear about? That was s ..read more

Profitable mushroom farming in an urban environment requires a different approach to farming. Let's talk about our mushroom farming business plan and let me take you on a trip in how we, since the beginning of 2013, gradually build a system of multiple cashflows to build a resilient business case. Traditional agriculture has only one knob to turn and that is volume. The centralised production and processing of food has not only brought a lot of environmental damage it also forced farmers in a pile of debt. A lot of farmers are struggling to make a living. As we sh ..read more

Profitable mushroom farming was what we wanted to do when we started cultivating mushrooms in 2013. But we were not knowledgeable about the subject. I have eaten mushrooms but that was about it. ;-) When we started our mushroom farm, we began with oak logs but abandoned that cultivation method 1,5 year after we started. How do you choose your cultivation method? Each method comes with its pros and cons. In this blog I’m going to take you through the most common cultivation options you have when starting profitable mushroom farming. We have experience with 4 of these 5 methods. The one we have ..read more

After working 15 years in financial services, most of the time at insurance companies, I decided it was time for a change. I no longer felt connected with that branch, the way it treats its employees and its customers. I wanted to change my occupation and do something with sustainability. But I didn’t know what exactly. So, I decided to begin with change my network. Because I strongly believe in: It’s not what you know, but who you know. That choice eventually led me to start a mushroom farm based on open source principles in the beginning of 2013. In this blog post I share with you the lesson ..read more

It was december 2018, when we had to move module 1 of our online mushroom course from our previous platform. We where running the course on a Wordpress site with a membership plugin based on WishList Member™. For some reason the site got hacked and our customers could not log in. We moved to Kajabi and uploaded all the content in a hurry. Since then, we have done little maintenance to this course. With all the corona issues around us, we found time to do some catching up on this module.  Next to that we also made a change to the pricing of this course. We went from €350,- to €24 ..read more

Your impact matters! Why? Allow me to explain. Thanks to the policy of the national Dutch government, traditional agriculture has only one knob to turn. That is scale. If prices fall, and with that the income of the farmer, the solution for the farmer is to produce more to compensate for the difference. As a result of this scale, the farmer is forced to work with huge machines. We take more from our soil than we add. Partly for this reason, the organic matter content in the soils has been decreasing for years. This is one of the reasons why the UN has declared 201 ..read more

The corona measurements are having an effect all over the world. And although our urban mushroom farm is resilient to shocks, we had to adjust to the reality around us. One of those things was the sudden decline in coffee grounds.  As you might know, our urban farm grows oyster mushrooms on coffee grounds. We collect this coffee at the office buildings where our customers are located. These buildings produce up to 1000 kilo of coffee grounds per month!  With almost the entire working population of the Netherlands working from home and all the restaurants being closed, we ra ..read more