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

In 2018 we ​moved our mushroom farm ​to a rural ​location near Totnes in Devon where we grow mushrooms for local sale, make mushroom kits and teach mushroom growing courses.

Check out this video all about urban mushroom farming where we:

• discuss why growing mushrooms in cities make so much sense
• ​tell you about how we ran our urban mushroom farm
• and also discuss why the project came to an end

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
• ​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​

This is a video we made about the farm back in 2015:

​And here’s a ​few of photos from the farm:

Since 2013 a number of other urban mushroom farms have sprung up all over the world, and we expect many more will follow in the years ahead.

The prospect of growing mushrooms in cities, makes a lot of sense:

• you grow the mushrooms close to where they are consumed
• they can be grown on waste coffee grounds, an abundant urban waste stream
• you can grow mushrooms in many empty or under-utilised spaces
• urban mushroom farms have a lot of educational value for the local communities they exist in

Here’s a list of a few urban mushroom farms currently in operation:

1. La Caverne, Paris
2. Rotterzwam, Rotterdam
3. Permafungi, Brussels
4. Beyond Coffee, Copenhagen
5. Hut & Stiel, Vienna
6. Hive Urban Farms, Manchester
7. Lifecykel, Melbourne
8. The Mushroom Factory, Detroit
9. Mycopolitan, Philadelphia
10. South West Mushrooms, Phoenix

If you’d like to know more about how to set up and run a small scale mushroom farm in a city or elsewhere, then check out our free guide to setting up a low tech mushroom farm: