4) How does your experience with button mushrooms color your approach to specialty mushrooms?
5) You have experience spearheading a major project to set up button mushroom cultivation from the ground up. How does your experience developing a new system in a challenging regulatory and consumer market help you approach new sectors of mushroom farming?
The most important lesson from the projects of recent years is that before starting something, one needs a long-term strategy. Of course, circumstances and previously certain assumptions can change, but every construction must be based on a clear plan, and every business needs a market, both topics I have emphasized extensively in my editorials for this journal. In the end, however, one must be aware of one thing: we are farmers. We are not producers of dead matter and what we produce is not completely and perfectly within our control. We work with natural systems, rather than completely dictating them. All the modern jargon employed by start ups and capital investment firms, which often amounts to little more than empty talk, cannot obscure the fact that we are dealing with a living organism in mushrooms - an organism that, ultimately, we cannot manipulate at will. Therefore, we should stop talking about “products” and instead speak of food. We should adapt our working methods to given circumstances, but we must never forget: we work with nature, and we should maintain our respect for it, for in the end, it is nature that nourishes us. To successfully cultivate mushrooms, one must first develop a sensitivity for living things and the respect that comes with it. I consider farming an exercise in mutual respect, respect for the fragile but marvelous systems that support our complex modern society. That, ultimately, is the greatest lesson I have learned after years in mushroom cultivation.

6) What is the one, single thing you would say the European market needs more than anything else right now?
7) Lastly, how would you integrate the mushroom sector across other industries, especially the more technology oriented “green” industries focused on sustainability and the traditional agricultural sector?
First of all, I find the term “industry” entirely inappropriate when it comes to food. I understand that the term is primarily used to describe the economic production methods that we utilize to make food widely accessible. However, the food industry is increasingly dominated by a hyper-technological culture that strips organisms of their essence and degrades them to mere commodities. If one truly wants to integrate edible mushrooms into a real example of a sustainable industry, one genuinely deserving of the moniker “green industry,” then one must ask whether this can be achieved without a culture attuned to nature, and a willingness to embrace complex relationships that resist the capitalist need for viewing each product as if it existed in a self-contained vacuum. In Europe especially, an entire “start-up” culture of companies borrowing from America’s Silicon Valley now promote a vision for the future in which we only need to change technology and can otherwise maintain the same standard of living - just in a significantly more sustainable way. This no sacrifice, no inconveniences sales pitch colors expectations for an easy and non-traumatic transition to the next economic and environmental conditions facing mankind. This is just not historically accurate to how such transitions occur. In my view, this vision is just wishful thinking - just consider the rare earth elements that this industry itself requires, or the heavy use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and petrol-powered heavy machinery that agriculture as we know it requires. What we need is a cultural revolution in food production, and this honestly starts with something largely out of the hands of farmers and that is to say, the dietary habits of consumers. If mushroom growers succeed in making the full value of mushrooms, nutritional and ecological, accessible to a broader audience, then it can indeed be part of a green revolution. But to get to that point will require a lot of work, and that is the biggest challenge we have in Europe right now.