GroCycle Urban Mushroom Farm

Mushrooms In Urban Agriculture [& Why This Trend Is Growing]

GroCycle Urban Mushroom Farm was a unique and innovative urban agriculture project based in the city of Exeter (UK), that we operated between 2013 – 2017.

You might wonder: why did we want to grow mushrooms in the middle of a city anyway?

Unlike traditional crops, mushroom don’t require sunlight or acres of fields to grow. They can be grown in controlled environments in unused urban spaces like dark basements and abandoned buildings, or in pop-up grow rooms like adapted shipping containers.

This allows for high-density vertical farming right next to where the consumers are, virtually eliminating the carbon footprint of ‘food miles’, and providing a fantastic opportunity for educational visits demonstrating food production in urban areas.

Beyond space, mushrooms can also act as the city’s natural recyclers. They can be cultivated on common urban waste streams—such as spent coffee grounds from cafes or sawdust from local woodshops—turning waste into high-quality nutritious food in as little as two weeks.

Once harvested, the leftover substrate is a nutrient-rich compost that can revitalize urban community gardens.

By localising production, cities gain food security and year-round harvests unaffected by seasonal shifts.

The GroCycle urban mushroom farm was based on the 3rd floor of an unused office building right in the heart of Exeter.

We converted the space into a series of rooms for different stages of the growing process, and each week:

hundreds of kilos of waste coffee grounds were collected from city cafes
the coffee grounds were used as the substrate to grow delicious Oyster mushrooms & for our mushroom kits
the mushrooms were delivered to the best restaurants and food outlets in the South West of England
the waste from our own growing cycle was turned into fertile compost