The Farm

Part of NZ's landscape since 1970

From our farm to your table

The Meadow Mushrooms’ farm is based in Canterbury, where it first began some 50 years ago. Since then, it’s continued to grow - along with kiwis’ love for mushrooms. Continual investment and a genuine commitment to sustainable business practices has seen it flourish into the country’s largest fully integrated mushroom farm - complete with farm and pack house and serviced by a compost yard, both in nearby sites.

Being fully integrated means we can oversee the mushroom journey from start to finish - making sure we deliver the very best mushrooms, at the very best value, from our farm to your local store or restaurant daily.

9 million+

mushrooms hand-picked on our farm every week.

450

plus employees across 4 sites

16 days

after the compost enters the growing room, the first mushrooms are ready to be picked.

We’ve turned growing New Zealand’s best mushrooms into a real craft. Here’s how it’s done.

1. Raw Natural Compost

Compost is the ‘substrate’ in which our mushrooms grow. It’s made up of three basic raw materials - wheat straw, chicken manure and gypsum - and it’s where the mushrooms get all their essential goodness and nutrients. Preparing and mixing the compost takes about two weeks before it’s pasteurised.

2. Spawning

Once the compost is pasteurised, we mix it with mushroom ‘spawn’. In the same way you might plant seeds in soil, we plant spawn in compost. Spawn is grain-coated with mycelium (the vegetative part of fungi) which then grows into the compost. The key is careful management of the heat generated as the mycelium grows.

3. Casing & Growing

The fully colonised compost now has a 5cm thick layer of peat (mushroom casing) covering it. This performs two important functions; it has a ‘buffering’ effect that helps the compost not dry out during cropping, and it contains naturally occurring microbes that encourage the mycelium to fruit. Nurtured with water, temperature and humidity, the magic soon begins! Tiny mushrooms start appearing (this is called ‘pinning’), and just 16 days after the compost entered the growing room we can pick our first mushrooms.

4. Hand-picked harvesting

When the mushrooms reach the right size, our harvesters hand-pick them directly into the box or punnet. We grow three different types of mushrooms – White Buttons, Swiss Brown Buttons and Portabellos. Mushrooms double in size every 24 hours so they need to be picked at the right time, before they get too big.

5. ‘Spent’ Compost

Once all the mushrooms have been picked, the growing room is emptied before we refill it and start the process all over again. A typical large growing room can contain as much as 150 tonnes of compost and peat - or ‘spent compost’. Full of nutrients and organic goodness, it’s emptied out of the trays and shelves into trucks and used by farmers and gardeners as a fertiliser to help grow a variety of crops, which can sometimes end up as organic matter for our future compost. So nothing goes to waste and it helps create a circular eco-system.