[sibane]

What do you mean by spore costs? Wouldn't most large scale farming operations work with liquid cultures based on live mycelium? Liquid cultures are easy to multiply and inject into pasteurized substrate with needles. Once the mycelium has taken over the growing medium, it also no longer needs to be kept in a fully sterile environment.

I'm not at all convinced a pound of mushrooms is worth that much more than pork. Are you sure it's not the meat industry subsidies that are keeping the price down?

[VLM]

There don't seem to be subsidies for Pork. There was a "Small Hog Operation Payment" last century that paid $10 per hog for the first 500 hogs sold by a farm, according to wikipedia, but they got rid of that a long time ago. That is well under 10% the sale price of a hog.

The problem mushrooms have is scale, much like spices. We can grow 20K acres of mechanized corn, but mushrooms are a little less mechanized. So its to be expected for mushrooms to cost as much as basil or cilantro per pound.