In California, water is becoming harder to come by, forcing some farms to scale back or stop planting altogether. But in San Diego county, one farm is growing a crop that uses way fewer resources in the process. That crop being mushrooms.
Roberto Ramirez walks us through the multi-step growing process of them, from compost to controlled rooms where mushrooms quite literally grow in the dark. At peak production, the farm can produce up to 5,000 pounds of mushrooms a week using, at most, about 5,000 gallons of water.
"When you talk about other crops, it's a much higher number, so we are able to show ourselves that we're very sustainable," Ramirez explains. To put his thought into perspective; It takes about one gallon of water to grow one pound of mushrooms. Compare that to roughly eight gallons for a pound of tomatoes.
It's a decision Ramirez thought carefully about when he bought the farm in the early 2000s, during one of California's worst drought periods, years before major statewide water restrictions took hold.
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