Chicken of the Woods
Primary Challenge Question: What does a decentralized mycological breeding and commercialization program for a new mushroom variety look like?
Check out the proposal in Catalyst Fund here:
Mushroom Breeding Program (ideascale.com) (you’ll need to sign up for ideascale to view the full proposal and comments, but you can also find it at the end of this post)
Each September, a fallen oak erupts in rosettes of neon orange flesh. After 3 days, 20 lbs of choice fungus is hanging off the wood. Squirrels have a nibble, deer a little chomp, a slug makes a meal of it and the rest hangs waiting for a forager or an army of decomposers to pick it to the bone. If the fruitbodies survive to maturity, they exhale clouds of spores before yielding to the forest, leaving behind a bleached white skeleton, the fragments of which lie on the duff through winter, waiting for a keen forager to take note.
It was the dream of cultivating chicken of the woods mushrooms indoors, outdoors, that inspired me to start a mushroom farm back in 2014. We built Mycopolitan: Brian, Dave and I, total noobs to business and the growing of mushrooms or anything at scale. Quickly the dream sketches of chicken mushrooms fruiting from hundreds of sawdust blocks evolved into a business plan where we bootstrapped the dream with the help of known commercial mushroom cultivars. We started growing traditional varieties for restaurants around Philly. Oysters, king trumpets, shiitake, lions mane, nameko, pioppino, eventually chestnuts, reishi, black pearls, beech and maitake. Going on 7 years later, this is how we make our livings.
It turns out building and operating a small subterranean urban mushroom farm is about as big a challenge as our small team of weirdos can bite off and we’ve all but forgotten the initial dream of seeing chickens grow indoors. Nonetheless, it’s the dream that inspired the germination of Mycopolitan, which has in turn created the day-to-day headspace (hanging out with mushrooms all day) that led to such ideas as drawing mushrooms on mushrooms (Cardano Conks) and starting the search for where the crypto ecosystem might merge with natural ecosystems (regenseed.io)
Over the years, only once did we follow our dream of growing chickens. Back in Fall 2015, we tested a handful of strains that I’d collected from wild specimens around the Delaware Valley. The result of that trial yielded one strain that actually produced a fruit. It was only a 1/4lb mushroom growing off of a 6lb bag of sawdust supplemented with wheat bran. But it was proof that further R+D had a shot at yielding strains and cultivation methods that could make this species commercially viable for indoor growing. Researchers in Ukraine and Israel had also made progress on this front, though there remains to this day no market for indoor-grown chicken mushrooms, despite their absolute deliciousness.
Anyway, we love C.O.W. It’s such a unique and meaty and tender and flavorful species. And we love that it inspired us to build a mushroom farm that allows us to make a living doing what we love. And we want to do what we can to say thank you to chicken of the woods by making progress on our dream of growing chickens. And this time, we don’t want to do it alone. Because we actually want to see it get done!!
We live in a world of emerging decentralized systems consisting of intelligent and capable actors like you. So instead of doing this work under cloak of secrecy at Mycopolitan in order to corner the market for ourselves, we want to use the opportunity to connect with other chicken lovers out there and grow a decentralized network of foragers, mycologists, farmers, citizen-scientists, artists and collectors who together will figure out, from scratch, grassroots, develop a commercially-viable strain of a species. No promises, but either way we’ll have fun along the way, collect a lot of strains, and learn a thing or two. But I think we can do it. Mushroom people find a way.
Hen of the Chicken of the Woods
A Chicken (“The Fruiter”) Grows at Mycopolitan, October 2015
Chicken of the woods. Chicken Mushroom. Sulphur Shelf. Laetiporus Sulphureus. Laetiporus Cincinnatus.
Chicken of the Woods stands out in a few ways. The mycelium smells like a combination of butterscotch and egg yolks. Most mycelium is white, but chicken mycelium is bright orange (but not as bright as the shelfs themselfs) . The mycelium seems to propogate more like a mold than mycelium typical of other higher fungi. Chicken of the woods mycelium readily breaks apart into tiny threads (hyphae) ,which are picked up and spread by vectors like wind and squirrels. Because the mycelium contains the full bi-nucleate genome (that originated some time in the past when two compatible chicken mushroom spores germinated next to eachother and made sweet plasmogamy), when a hyphae (that is binucleate, meaning a complete organism that can grow branching mycelium and produce mushrooms and spores) lands on another tree, if the conditions are right, the mycelium can get right to work. No need for two lonely spores to share a glance at the bar at last call. This has clear advantages from a species dominance perspective (chickens will infect more trees, leaving fewer trees to be infected by hen of the woods or turkey tails- though turkey tails are promiscuous since they mostly hangout in the sapwood), with a small price to pay in genetic diversity since the newly infected tree has “the same” chicken mushroom mycelium as the old tree. And with age comes senescence, a slow weakening of the organism until it ceases to live. BUT, that’s only half the story.
So, while mycelium can hop on a squirrel and infect a new tree, effectively cloning itself into a new host— and this can lead to a lot of the same genetics in a forest— it seems that this fungible species complex has evolved a method of increasing genetic diversity. How do we know that? Well, I don’t know for sure. But I cloned a lot of chickens back in the day. And when I do, I usually take a few tissue samples from different sections of a mushroom. And because I’m cheap and don’t like pouring agar plates, I often put two of the pieces of tissue on the same plate. This led to a puzzling discovery.
First, it’s important to realize that mushrooms are just glorified mycelium that’s differentiated itself into a fruiting body that pops out to release spores (sex cells). You can test this yourself by taking the stembutt (there shouldn’t be spores present in the butt to confound your experiment) from an oyster mushroom from the store and put it on some soaked cardboard, wait a few days, and you’ll see mycelium leaping off onto the cardboard. So looking at our chicken mushroom agar plate, you have happy orange mycelium racing out of the tissue sample on the left. And you have happy orange mycelium racing out of the tissue on the right. And most the time when they meet, they merge immediately because they are genetically identical. That’s what you’d expect since they came from the same mushroom. In fact, you’d expect to see that with mushrooms that grow from another part of the same tree (that are the same kind), and from mushrooms collected from that tree year after year. And most of the time, with most species, that’s exactly what you find.
Not so with chicken mushrooms. Of the 50ish chickens I’ve cloned, roughly half were sharing an agar plate with another sample from the same mushroom. And out of those 25ish, two of those plates did something strange. When the mycelium from the left met the mycelium on the right, they didn’t merge, they formed a linear zone of antagonism indicating incompatibility. Indeed, this proves that two sections of the same mushroom were genetically DISsimilar.
two incompatible strains from a single mushroom meet on a plate in August, 2012 (from my old old blog chickenmushrooms.wordpress.com)
How can that be? How can there be two unique individuals packed into one fungal sex organ? Well, the how would be simple evolution: mutations x conservation of favorable mutations x time. So the question is Why? Why would nature select for such a thing? It makes sense when you think about it. Fungi don’t need to play by the same rules as us. Since it’s in their toolbelt to be able to stuff two genetically identical organisms into one sex organ, they’ll do it if they have a reason. Chicken of the woods, because it spreads vegetatively through the forest most of the time (remember the squirrel), doesn’t get genetic variety via the usual route of starting from scratch with spores each time it leaps to a new host. It accomplishes this by packing extra pairs of nuclei into its network. Then when it comes time to fruit a mushroom, those nuclei flow to the mushroom so when it's time to release spores, the plume of spores will contain more genetic diversity than your typical mono-genotypic mushroom sporeload.
Ecologically, chicken of the Woods provides a unique ecological service that needs to be better understood. Laetiporus species are some of the most selective and aggressive brown-rot fungi out there. They are considered brown-rot because the mycelium converts the wood of the tree from a light pink color to a dark reddish-brown as a result of selectively breaking down cellulose and hemicellulose which leaves behind a cubical-structure of almost pure lignin. They are technically a “brown cubical rot of heartwood.”
These lignious cubes break down very slowly. When dry they are many times lighter than dry wood. They act similar to biochar (basically charcoal), in that they absorb water, harbor lots of microorganisms and break down slowly. Comparison to biochar is only based on basic observation- more research is needed. We often observe mycorrhizal species of bolete like the old man of the woods fruiting from a slowly-decayhing mound of lignin produced by chicken mushrooms. This material is very interesting from the perspective of soil-building, carbon sequestration, and research into these areas will likely teach us something interesting, as we’re used to new forays into mycology doing.
Chicken Mushrooms are really yummy. They can have a texture that is extremely similar to chicken. And when they’re young they’re extremely tender, unlike any mushroom. A bit like raw tuna. The flavor is difficult to describe, but it’s powerful. And the bright orange pigmentation is heat stable, so unlike species like pink and blue oysters, chickens keep their color. I wish you could walk into a store and buy chicken of the woods. PS, when we do get to that point, it will likely be in the freezer section. Chickens turn acidic after a couple days post-harvest. But they freeze quite well fresh.
So how do we incentivize the cloning and open-sourcing of wild chicken mushroom genetics?
Firstly, what are our takeaways from our initial success fruiting chickens back in 2015? While most of the strains collected were growing from Red Oaks, it wasn’t uncommon to find some on Chestnut/White/Pin Oak, Ash, Blackcherry, Black Locust, and I even came across one on sassafras and another on dogwood! Of the 10 strains we tried fruiting, maybe 2 of them were Ash, and The Fruiter turned out to be one of those Ash Strains.
1) it’s probably wise to incentivize the collection of chicken clones from Ash trees. This is especially true because Ash trees have died off at an incredible rate thanks to the Emerald Ash Borer. Not only are we losing the ashes, but other species of fungi, insect, bird, mammal, etc that rely on them are taking a hit. If we don’t clone these Ash-grown chickens in time, we may lose these ecologically and commercially important genetics forever.
2) We also might assume that chickens growing on oddball tree species might have a little more flexibility built into them, and that might make them better candidates for fruiting in the context of an indoor farm.
3) We should incentivize the cloning of multiple tissue samples from a single host and put them on single plates and separate plates, note the location of the tissue sample (from disparate “shelfs” X different anatomical sections of the shelves e.g. orange tops vs white area north of pores) because a) multiple genotypes can exist within one fruitbody and b) we don’t know what role this plays in fruiting indoors.
4) Not all chickens are tasty. We should incentivize the collection of tasty strains and incentivize the additional cloning work recommended in #3.
So how do we incentivize the 1) collection of chicken strains and 2) collection of Ash chickens, oddball tree chickens, elaborate cloning strategies, and tasty chickens?
Use what you got. What do we got? NFTS!
WHAT DO YOU NEED TO BE A STRAIN ISSUER?
1) a strain, a sterile tissue sample (plates preferred, but vials and tubes accepted)
2) geolocation data of some sort: doesn’t have to be super specific since not everyone needs to know exactly where your mushroom spot is, but specificity is appreciated, especially for private property.
3) a photo of the mushroom (preferably fruiting on the tree)
4) host tree species
5) a name for your strain
6) any metadata you’d like included
7) answers on a form on potential smart-contract needs that we can walk you through in the future.
THE DETAILED PLAN from Mushroom Breeding Program (ideascale.com)
Market growth for "specialty" mushrooms has... mushroomed in recent years. There are species of wild gourmet and medicinal fungi with market potential that have not been developed for commercial cultivation due to the current siloed nature of commercial mushroom R+D.
While the R+D is siloed, mushrooms strains are all around us that have the potential to contribute to breeding programs that will birth entirely new commercially-viable varieties.
By incentivizing the networking of foragers with DIY mycology labs, professional labs, and mushroom farms, we can accelerate the rate of R+D tremendously, while democratizing the commercialization of new mushroom varieties. All while having a lot of fun with NFTs.
It is also important to understand that the majority of specialty mushroom cultivation takes place within a relatively narrow scope of parameters. When we realize that people around the world, in different climates, with different resources, are awakening a love for eating and for growing mushrooms, the number of potential species goes far beyond what the established mushroom farms in the world can grow commercially, and we can help to facilitate development of regionally-relevant mushrooms throughout the world for growers of all size, while we are focused on leveraging the desire of established farmers to offer new species to their customers.
For the sake of focus, let's focus on one species: Chicken of the Woods (a.k.a chicken mushroom, sulphur shelf, laetiporus sulphureus/cincinnatus)
I have some ideas for how to approach this challenge that I'll summarize here. But I am one person with a limited scope and all I can do at this point is offer a "draft" for how to structure the project. The goal of this Fund6 proposal is to take the following "draft" and forming it into a strong proof-of-concept. We warmly welcome you to join if you have perspectives/ideas/skills to bring to the table.
Who do we need on the team for Fund6? This project involves networking individuals who are not crypto savvy and making it easy for them to participate, so there will be an emphasis on user-friendly front end. We may (or may not) need to deploy sound smart contracts that are adapted from e.g. Marlowe and execute on block chains/side chains (TBD). While we may not begin the "build" in this funding round, it would be extremely helpful to have the developer expertise there to help us understand what is possible. Because we may be stepping into the waters of financial regulations, we also need a legal expert in this field to assure that we aren't opening a can o' regulatory worms.
We also look forward to piggybacking on the great work happening in the Cardano NFT marketplace world. Some of the biggest open questions in the project are related to how NFTs are bought and sold, both initially and in the aftermarket. Looking forward to exploring our options with this exciting community!
STEP 1: COLLECT THE GENES
The first step in any breeding program worth its muster is to amass a collection of wild strains, preserved as mycelial cultures. These cultures can be held at any of the participating mycological Culture Libraries. For now, these culture libraries simply back up copies of the culture and keep them in safe long term storage. Down the road, the culture libraries will be responsible for cloning and distributing strains to growers involved in the breeding program.
Who collects the genes? Foragers! For a forager to participate they must a) open an ada wallet, and share b) a photo of the wild mushroom c) metadata associated with the wild strain (location and time of harvest, species of tree host etc.) , and d) a name for their strain and most importantly they must e) send a viable culture of their strain's mycelium to a participating culture library. For now, we will leave out f) the smart-contract piece.
Why would a forager want to participate? Besides the desire to participate in a fun passion project? Here's where NFTs make their entrance. A forager that goes through all required steps is issued a token that symbolizes or represents their strain(s). This NFT, either through natural market forces or executable smart contracts gives them a potential "stake" in the final product. If a strain they provided goes through the decentralized breeding program and ends up contributing genetics to a final commercial strain, then the value of their NFT goes up, either organically, or through executing their equity. Before we proceed, it's important to make a distinction between two types of NFTs that we can deploy:
Wild-Type vs Executable NFTs pt. 1
My understanding is that we can break NFTs into two categories: one I'll call "wild-type" and the other I'll call "executable" for lack of better words. There may be better terms for these concepts floating out there. Wild type NFT is one that functions solely as a collectible. While there may be basic smart contracts that enable more functionality than standard collectibles e.g. splitting up ownership, or even royalties paid out during aftermarket activity, these smart contracts pertain only to the collectible itself. An executable NFT on the other hand represents other assets beyond the NFT itself. Smart contracts can execute functions that relate to the underlying assets.
In my view, if we have a shot at accomplishing what we want with a Wild Type NFT, we should give it a shot. In other words, if we can rely on the raw "collectability" of a token, we can perhaps achieve our goals with limited regulatory contact.
In the wild type, the NFT is a collectible that functions as a "symbol" of a wild mushroom strain. In the executable type, the NFT represents a physical asset (the genes of a wild mushroom).
In the latter type, smart contracts define the owners equity in the final product (the commercial strain(s)) should they be lucky enough to contribute genetics.
But, wouldn't it be cool if the game theoretics of the marketplace play out such that a wild-type NFT owned by a forager (a collectible that chronicles a wild strain rather than represents it) would organically demand a higher price on the open market thanks to its scarcity, uniqueness, and the story around it?
****Please see comments from @solarcatzshelley below for more relevant info on the Howey Test and how this applies to the NFTs in this proposal and others.***on to step 2:
STEP 2: GROW OUT AND BREED THE STRAINS:
At this point we have culture libraries filled with backups of unique strains. We have the gene pool we need to begin actively growing and breeding the strains. Now it's time to activate the Growers!
A mushroom like chicken of the woods is going to have only a small fraction of wild strains produce even a tiny fruit indoors. A strain that produces a fruit, any fruit, is a viable candidate for further breeding, especially if the fruit matures healthily and produces spores (generating even more genetic potential). Other characteristics that might "level up" a strain in the program would be flavor, promiscuity of tree host type, or other phenotypic indicators.
What would incentivize a grower (farmer, hobbyist, research company) to work with the strains? Well. the hope of breeding something good! If a forager is incentivize to contribute viable wild strains, a grower is incentivized to advance the breeding program by identifying which wild strains fruit, crossing spores of fruiting strains to yield new strains with e.g. higher yields. New strains are new NFTs, whether from the wild or from the lab.
How does a grower gain access to the genetic library? First, they must pledge to share any new viable strains that they develop with culture libraries, to be shared with other growers. We hope that social pressure will prevent them from going rogue and conducting a proprietary breeding program; i.e. if they come out with their commercial strain without sharing it, we shame them for being bad actors in the community, and they are unable to participate in the co-branding opportunity (see below). If there is genetic analysis done on strains, there may even be evidence of wrongdoing. Anyway, to facilitate the economics of the whole thing, growers may also pay the culture libraries for their strains. This is how culture libraries traditionally make their money, so this is pretty close to business-as-usual.
STEP 3: ACHEIVING COMMERCIAL STRAIN STATUS
So now we have wild strains backed up by NFTs, we have cultivated strains backed up by NFTs, and we are beginning to make headway. With every generation, new, better strains are coming out until eventually a grower makes a big hit. They grow a mushroom that is commercially viable, meaning it's high yielding (enough), tastes good, has decent shelf life, and growth parameters that are fairly easily duplicated.
If you are the grower who hits the jackpot, your NFT represents a commercially viable strain, the metadata includes any important information related to substrate, temperature, fruiting platforms, incubation time etc. You submit an early-generation culture to a culture library, and that culture library backs up versions of this to go out to other culture libraries, so the entire community of growers involved in the project has access to the youngest, least senescent version of this strain to begin growing the strain for market.
To incentivize the project as a whole, we will try and keep the strain "in the family" at first while we keep things quiet on the marketing side, giving the network of growers a chance to be the first to get chicken of the woods to their customers. Inevitably, someone will clone the mushroom from a store and the commercial strain will get out into the public, albeit not backed up in its youngest form. But that's ok, because the project was a success!
FURTHER DISCUSSION
Wild-Type vs Executable NFTs pt 2. equity chain of custody vs co-branding
Making our way back to the question of wild type vs executable NFTs. Culture libraries, spawn companies make their money by selling commercial strains and spawn made from these strains. This is an established income stream. Perhaps there is incentive for culture libraries to be involved to give them first dibs on selling the cultures and spawn to buyers.
Chain of Custody via Executable-Type NFTs. If this is the case, the executable-type NFTs could all connect up to this company itself to the point that all sales of the strain distribute profit down the chain- to the grower that developed the final strain to all the growers who contributed genetics to that strain to all the foragers who contributed genetics to those strains. All through smart-contract-backed-NFTs.
Co-Branding via Wild Type NFTs. On the other hand, if we go the wild-type NFT route, we may be able to leverage the story in an ongoing way to encourage value to flow organically through to members in the chain of custody. Growers can co-brand the chicken of the woods products they sell to end-consumers, plastering the packaging with a collage of all the images of the NFTs that contributed to the final product. Future fans of the product will see those images, read up on the backstory and find out that they too can play along by becoming the proud owner of one of those NFTs. They visit the project's NFT marketplace (auction??) and pay up.
non-NFT-based profit sharing
There can also be smart contracts deployed in the project not connected to NFTs. There can be, for instance, some level of profit sharing for all participants, whether they contributed to the final strain or not. This might look like future "releases" of NFTs by the project as a whole, where % proceeds go out to all participants.
onboarding a new network to Cardano
A valuable "bi-product" : We now have a network of foragers, growers, labs etc with Ada wallets and a track record of participating in real-life applications. We can use this network to tackle new challenges. The network of foragers and farmers and their markets can drive new innovation in areas like establishing incentives for responsible stewardship of forests (sorely needed, blog post coming out eventually on this topic). We can take on new species for similar breeding programs. The sky's the limit. And with more activity, we drive more adoption, more wallets opening up and a strong network effect.
The end result? Cardano is the digital ecosystem for Mushroom people. And mushroom people are the coolest :)
Looking Ahead
Should we be fortunate enough to earn funding for this project, the next step is to actually build it out! The front end, the marketplace, smart contracts, marketing team etc. This will be a much larger undertaking than the proof-of-concept we hope to develop with funding this round.
But a breeding program takes time. It's likely 2+ years until a given commercial strain comes to fruition. There is no reason to wait 2 years to begin taking action on the product side. Using our network of foragers (and onboarding yet more with this:) we can begin marketing different "decentralized" product(s). I have a delicious, nutritious, warm, creamy, rich, chaga-full beverage recipe that tells a story of the forest and which utilizes 4+ wild-crafted products. I would be more than happy to "decentralize" this recipe in order to get a jumpstart on answering first-principle questions related to "what is a decentralized product?" A recipe clue: the main ingredient is chaga.
TIMELINE (no later than...)
3 Months: Establish the core team responsible for releasing the "proof of concept"
6 Months: produce a white paper/ white board + initial build outs / mock ups.
9 Months: seek additional funding proposal for the build-out (via catalyst and/or issuance of Cardano Conk NFTs and/or traditional financing)
12 Months: Public Launch, by September 2022 40+ unique wallet addresses from foragers and 2+ culture libraries so we can begin collecting wild strains.
BUDGET
2500 for telling the story, white paper, white board, networking in the mushroom world (that's me and those who want to help)
3000 for developer consultation and mock-ups (front-end, smart contracts, user experience)
500 for legal consultation as relates to regulations and NFTs.
My Commitment: Whether this proposal receives funding or not, I am committed to helping to make Cardano and Catalyst as strong an ecosystem as possible, and I will continue to share my general and proposal-specific thoughts on the blog regenseed.io
Thank you for your consideration.