Oyster, shiitake, and portobello – these are but a few popular varieties of mushrooms finding their way to cooktops in homes and restaurants in the U.S. and across the world. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that the U.S. market for culinary mushrooms includes 900 million pounds of production worth $1.2 billion annually.
Yet, these spore-bearing fruiting bodies of fungi are still underutilized in the predominately plant-based agricultural economy.
Kennesaw State University researchers Christopher Cornelison and Kyle Gabriel are exploring the possibilities of improving the food supply chain by leveraging technology to expand the opportunities for mushroom production in Georgia.
“We must be able to develop sustainable methods for producing readily preserved and nutritious foods without regional climactic limitations,” said Cornelison, an assistant professor of microbiology in the College of Science and Mathematics and director of the BioInnovation Laboratory at KSU.
“Mushrooms provide unique nutritional, medicinal and economic benefits, yet their demand still exceeds their supply,” added Gabriel, a research scientist in the BioInnovation Laboratory.
Increasing global populations are putting a tremendous burden on the production and preservation of traditional crops such as produce. They require the use of limited arable land, are susceptible to ever-changing weather patterns, and can result in waste from post-harvest decay.
Mushrooms are an ideal crop as they rely predominantly on three environmental factors that can be regulated to optimize growth yield—humidity, temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations.
With a three-year award from the Georgia Department of Agriculture in 2017, the two collaborators conceived a plan to build a low-cost, small-footprint prototype of a semi-automated mushroom production facility in a shipping container. The current prototype, located at the KSU Field Station, can easily be set up anywhere, even in densely populated cities.
The linchpin of the project is the embedded environmental control system Gabriel designed with the open source software, called Mycodo, which he also developed and continuously updates. The system can autonomously regulate the growing conditions for mushrooms.
He first began mushroom cultivation as a hobby when he was an undergraduate student. He created a cultivation chamber in his closet with a rudimentary hardware and software system he developed to automate the process of mushroom growth.
“I am a firm believer in utilizing technology to improve quality of life, especially when it can result in fresher products locally sold, thereby reducing the carbon footprint of packaging and transportation,” said Gabriel. “Automation, especially on the urban scale, has the potential to not only improve crop yields, but give people back time to complete other activities.”
With about 10,000 known species of fungi living wildly in North America, only about 30 are palatable, and of those only about 10 varieties are grown commercially. This is because of both commercial interests as well as the difficulty of growing some varieties outside of nature.
The two researchers have completed test runs in the lab with various mushroom strains foraged wildly in Georgia and a few commercially available but not typically found in the state to find the best varieties that would be compatible with the proposed production method.
Gabriel explained their selection criteria included seeking out varieties that are highly palatable, have high production yields and ease of cultivation.
In fact, more than half of the nation’s mushroom production is associated with a single county in Pennsylvania. The substrates or media on which mushrooms grow, primarily mulch, is transported from the Midwest to meet the demand.
The next phase of this project is exploring how Georgia can compete in this market locally by growing these mushrooms on substrates of regional agricultural wastes such as peanut shells, corn chaff or spent brewing grains.
Daniel Rhiner, a prospective graduate student, was seeking a program where he could explore food sustainability issues through a research lens.
Rhiner reached out to Cornelison and Gabriel and was subsequently accepted into the integrative biology master’s degree program at KSU.
“The sustainability movement was very intriguing to me and I started to explore growing my own food at home, including mushrooms,” said Rhiner, who earned a bachelor’s degree in biology in 2013. “Not even a year after I graduated from KSU, I started foraging for mushrooms and learning that some foraged mushrooms can also be cultivated.”
Rhiner focused his thesis on how the low-value agricultural wastes could be repurposed as growth substrates to boost both mushroom profitability and sustainability. He looked at different agricultural waste substrates produced in Georgia and their potential for supporting the commercial growth of oyster mushrooms – the second most widely cultivated mushroom in the world which can grow on plant-based material.
“KSU professors like Chris Cornelison and Kyle Gabriel are competitively and aggressively seeking funding so that they can support graduate students to pursue their own research projects,” said Rhiner, now a part-time instructor of biology at KSU. “They were instrumental in making my graduate experience phenomenal and gave me the creative license to pursue my interests in mushroom cultivation and sustainability.”
As Rhiner graduated in summer 2020, the KSU team learned of their $25,000 award from the venture development program of the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) to further develop the agricultural waste substrate angle to study the commercial feasibility of taking their semi-automated mushroom production system in a shipping container to market.
This GRA program is the state’s only nonprofit catalyst for providing universities seed funds and access to mentors and consultants in forming companies around their research.
“Georgia has the resources to compete in this market with the appropriate application of technology and coordination of resources, including exploring potential partnerships with existing industrial and agricultural operations,” Cornelison said. “Part of our assessment will include determining production timing and yield rates with select agricultural wastes and the oyster mushroom as a model organism.”
With this GRA grant, KSU was also one of just two institutions to be invited to participate in the inaugural cohort of the Greater Yield initiative, recently launched by Lee Herron, GRA’s vice president of venture development. The Greater Yield initiative’s primary objective is to support university start-up companies focused on agricultural and food technology.
“We are very grateful for the support we have received from the Georgia Department of Agriculture and the Georgia Research Alliance thus far,” said Cornelison. “Participating in the Greater Yield accelerator program was crucial to helping us identify our path forward.”
That future path includes working closely with strategic partners over the next year to continue to optimize the technology and move it into a commercial reality. Cornelison added that this is an opportunity to create jobs, increase the availability of nutritious food, reduce the environmental impact of food transport, and recapture agricultural waste streams.
© 2026 Kennesaw State University
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