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Organic mushrooms grown using Starbucks coffee grounds and cardboard: a Hong Kong farmer’s quest to build a sustainable business
- Urban Mushroom, a one-man operation in Tuen Mun, currently produces about 60kg a week of three types of oyster mushroom
- Founder Russell Kong explains how he settled on his crop of choice, how he keeps it eco-friendly and why there’s still plenty of trial and error in growing them
Reading Time:3 minutes
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For four years at his indoor farm, in a desolate, industrial corner of Tuen Mun in Hong Kong’s New Territories, Russell Kong has been experimenting with strains of a very specific crop.
No dude, it’s not weed or anything illicit like that. Kong is the founder of Urban Mushroom and he is single-handedly trying to harvest edible fungus in the most eco-sensitive method possible, while trying to foster an economically sustainable enterprise.
“I did a sustainable agriculture degree in the UK and when I came back, I thought about what kind of agriculture I could go into,” Kong recalls. “My family owned a lot that used to be an old pig yard. There was a structure with a shelter and an indoor area so it’s not compatible for vegetables that need a lot of sunlight. I thought, how can I utilise the facility? And I started researching mushrooms.”
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After numerous rounds of tests and research, he decided oyster mushrooms would be most suitable for Hong Kong’s climate and conditions. In addition to space and spores, Kong still needed something else – substrate, or organic material that mushrooms could be harvested from.
“You need a lot of agriculture waste for mushroom growing,” he explains. “Things like straw and compost. Hong Kong doesn’t have a lot of that so I looked at what was in abundance. I realised I could use coffee grounds and cardboard to start.
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