It’s obviously important to know what your fruiting bags actually cost you, if you want to get a reasonable estimation of how well you’re doing and where you can improve things and decrease your costs. For large projects or orders it’s good to work it out your total costs just to make sure you’re where you want to be. How you value your labor is, of course, up to you.
I recently got an order for 25 five pound shiitake fruiting bags. A very fair price was worked out, and since it was a larger order, I decided to work out the actual amount of materials I’d require.
- 25 x Unicorn 14A bags
- 4 x Unicorn 3T bags (grain spawn)
- 23kg hardwood fuel pellets
- 3.5kg wheat bran
- 1.25kg hydrated lime
- 6-7kg colonized grain spawn
- approximately 50kWh of electricity
- water, which is not metered where I live
How much this costs varies based on where you are and how much you pay for various supplies, of course, so what this adds up to for me is meaningless for anyone else. If it was summer, I would have to factor in the cost of the heat pump sinking the heat from sterilization.
