Mana Mushrooms

Community

Indirectly advocating a return to decentralized agricultural production, Mana Mushrooms is developing viable business strategies to leverage localized means of production. As the cost of fuels increases, fossil, renewable, and otherwise, the local-ness of food becomes more important. The folks at Slow Food have this figured out, and so do the folks at Grass Commons.

At this time, we have the luxury of choice in this matter. While it lasts, it seems an exciting chance to exploit market forces while putting ourselves in the path of greatness, to paraphrase a portion of a recent Stanford Podcast in the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series.

Mid-Scale Industry

We’re practical, too. We understand that individuals and small groups make a vital difference:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

- Margaret Meade

Some challenges can be more effectively met by multi-tiered approaches. We think of it as breaking up the problem, increasing its surface area and catalyzing more reactions to dissolve it… or something like that. It’s still individual decision-makers making the difference.
Mid-scale industry can contribute important resources (think big box retailers harvesting rainwater, industrial plants contributing re-harvested waste heat, and generally recapture of otherwise wasted resources in a pareto efficient manner). It’s the same idea, but very different, in terms of logistics and implementation. As the scale changes, the challenge changes. It’s fun. We like noodling on these kinds of challenges and are neither going to limit ourselves in terms of potential opportunities, nor focus only on one model. These are huge challenges (feeding 300 million Americans without burdening the rest of the world with traditionally externalized costs, increasing the productivity of available arable land, etc…) and they require collaborative efforts. Before we face collapse, this is manifest as vast opportunities for healthy economic growth. After, it seems that this opportunity transforms by virtue of scarcity thinking to represent competitive, zero-sum models which in turn lead to net cultural loss.

Aside: “Am I a decision maker?” Yes. Whether buying one package or notifying Mana Mushrooms of your interest in our project through our contact form, exercise your power as a decision-maker!

Large Industry

From the Department of Defense to the largest public companies in the world, Mana Mushrooms seeks to incorporate self-interested partners to drive social change through pareto efficient business opportunities. Although this social change may not be the primary focus for our partner(s), it certainly spurs our innovation and drives part of our mission: reducing the cumulative human footprint.

The larger the partner, the more resources at play, the greater the scale of change possible. Many of the same ideas are at play in the other scales described here. The size and nature of our partners has significant impact on the systems design for a given partner. For example: a brewer producing 450 million tons of spent grain per year is significantly different from one producing 150 million tons who is different still from a brewery with a capacity of 1000 barrels and on down the line to the smallest brewpub. Each will be faced with a unique set of conditions which require evaluation in context.

This thoughtful analysis and evaluation is part of the value add offered by the Mana Mushrooms team.