Dear Members, 

Below is the link to the new round of Economic Injury Disaster Loan advance application:

https://covid19relief.sba.gov/#/

This is for a loan of up to $10,000 and is intended to provide economic relief specifically to agricultural businesses at this moment. This loan advance will not need to be repaid. 

Some general information:

• Agricultural businesses include those businesses engaged in the production of food and fiber, ranching, and raising of livestock, aquaculture, and all other farming and agricultural related industries (as defined by section 18(b) of the Small Business Act (15 U.S.C. 647(b)).
• SBA is encouraging all eligible agricultural businesses with 500 or fewer employees wishing to apply to begin preparing their business financial information needed for their application.
• For agricultural businesses that submitted an EIDL application through the streamlined application portal prior to the legislative change, SBA will process these applications without the need for re-applying

Kind regards, 

Bree Rodriguez
Program Coordinator
Arizona Mushroom Growers Association 
School of Plant Sciences, University of Arizona
breeanne@arizona.edu

Dear AZMGA members, 

We hope  you and your loved ones are doing well during these difficult times. We will remain active online, answering questions via email and sending out any pertinent information regarding the mushroom industry to our members. 

For those of you running a business please see the pdfs found in the post above regarding loan assistance to help cover such expenses as payroll costs, interest on mortgage obligations, rent and utilities. 

For more information on how the COVID 19 pandemic affects the mushroom industry, the safety of our products, and how the US mushroom industry is responding, please visit the following web site for more information:
www.americanmushroom.org/covid-19

Stay safe and healthy. 

Kind regards, 

Bree Rodriguez
Program Coordinator
Arizona Mushroom Growers Association 
School of Plant Sciences, University of Arizona
breeanne@arizona.edu

In order to better serve growers around the state, the AZMGA is excited to announce that we are seeking members for an advisory board. The advisory board will help us to expand our reach and better leverage our resources to continue building the mushroom growing industry here in Arizona.
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The board will teleconference bi-monthly and meet in-person once per year. If you are passionate about mushroom cultivation and bolstering the production industry in Arizona we would love to have you as part of our board! All you have to do is fill out our application form, located here.

We're looking forward to hearing from you! This is an important next step for the AZMGA and we want you to be a part of it! Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Thanks to everyone who signed up for our September workshop here in Tucson! The response was fast and furious, and the workshop has reached capacity. We'll post any news about upcoming workshops here on the AZMGA website and via our newsletter mailing list. Looking forward the 7th!

​September 7 2018
1pm - 5pm
UA Controlled Environment Agricultural Center
1951 E Roger Rd
Tucson AZ
$20

Good news for those of you in Southern AZ—the AZMGA will be holding the second session of our workshop on our home turf here in Tucson! Substrates to Sales picks up where our previous workshop left off and addresses such subjects as pasteurization, substrate mixtures, GHP/GAP certification and more! 

In addition to the informational resources, participants will inoculate their own jar of grain spawn to take home as well as bulk-inoculate substrate to take and watch the mycelium grow.

Hope to see you all there! To register, just fill our the form here and you'll be all set for September. 

Due to a scheduling conflict we have changed the date of our new workshop in Flagstaff. Rather than holding the workshop on June 6th we have changed the date to June 27th. We still have a few spots left, so if you were unable to attend on the original date, maybe this one will better suit you!

This workshop will build upon our original workshop, Fundamentals of Small-Scale Mushroom Production. We'll be focusing on some of the research done on substrates with respect to different mushroom species, techniques of low-tech, low resource pasteurization and other practical aspects of growing mushrooms in Arizona. You can register here. See you in Flagstaff!

Thanks to everyone who came out for our workshop in Sierra Vista this past Wednesday! We've traveled with this workshop all across the state over the last couple of years, and it's still a great pleasure to meet and interact with people who are excited about growing mushrooms. 

Along with the lecture portion of the workshop, we successfully bulk-inoculated 32 grow bags with Pearl Oyster spawn, which participants took home to fruit out for themselves. Everyone at the workshop also performed a culture transfer of Blue Oyster mycelium and left with their own petri dish of culture. 

We hope that the workshop has inspired people to get started growing mushrooms! Keep in mind that the AZMGA is here to help in any way that we can—whether its providing grow bags and spawn or informational resources to guide you through the grow process. You can also always contact us with specific questions, photos of your grow operation, or just anecdotes about successes and not-exactly-successes that you've experienced cultivating mushrooms. We look forward to hearing from you!

It's a well-known fact that when mushrooms are exposed to sunlight their Vitamin D content increases. In fact, after six hours in sunlight shiitake mushrooms have 400 times more Vitamin D than shiitakes not exposed to the sun (source here). Even without exposure to the sun, mushrooms have a range of incredible health benefits. They contain B vitamins like riboflavin and niacin, have high levels of ergothionine (an antioxidant found in beans, bran, and liver), and conjugated linoleic acid (an anti-cholesterol compound), among other things.

Given these qualities, what effects might other types of light have on the nutritional compounds that already exist in mushrooms? The AZMGA's partners at the University of Arizona are examining this question. In the photo above  Pearl Oyster mushrooms are growing in a wash of blue, white, or red LED lights. The Pryor and Kacira Labs at the U of A are growing under these unique conditions to determine the effects on the content of ergothianine, beta glucan, and protein in the mushrooms.

As with all of the research done by our University partners, at the conclusion of the experiment the AZMGA will share the results with our members. As interest in functional mushrooms and their nutritional properties  increases, being able to naturally and easily increase the amounts of their desirable compounds would give Arizona mushrooms a competitive edge! Stay tuned for the findings of this ongoing experiment. And don't forget to check out the research page here at the AZMGA website for the findings of the Pryor Lab's previous research into substrates, spawn and fruiting environments.