Mycro Harvest

This interview details Mycro Harvest, an indoor farming company based in Canada. The interview is with Christopher Klich, Co-Founder & CEO of Mycro Harvest.

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What is the origin story of Mycro Harvest?

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Chris and Justin met at the Entrepreneur First program in Toronto and quickly connected through their love of nature and drive to work toward a more sustainable future. Drawing on Justin's years of experience as a hobby mycologist and building smart farms, the two dove deep into the ag-tech space and identified a massive opportunity in the mushroom industry. 

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Mushrooms are one of the lowest carbon food sources, and demand for fungi has been significantly increasing over the past few years as we push toward healthier diets. This is also compounded by the use of mushrooms for new sustainable materials, plant-based foods and more. As the two dove more into the industry, they quickly realized farmers were struggling to meet the growing demand for mushrooms as they could not find enough skilled labour to operate the farms, bottlenecking an entire industry. Mycro Harvest was founded to leverage artificial intelligence to overcome this technical knowledge gap to unlock the scalable production of mushrooms for low-carbon food, materials and more. 

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What are some of the biggest challenges facing Mycro Harvest in the future?

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Mycro Harvest is constantly adapting to the challenges of implementing technology into a field that has traditionally had very little technology integration. Mushroom farms are harsh, damp, dark and humid environments. Our technology needs to be robust, accurate and trustworthy to gain industry adoption. Farmers are also hesitant to adopt new technologies and for this reason, we have worked closely with the farmers to ensure we continue to deliver the highest possible value. 

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What is unique about Mycro Harvest compared to competitors? 

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We've taken a system-level perspective to identify the key points in the production process that we can augment significantly to optimize the human, rather than removing them from the process completely, as competitors have attempted. This has allowed us to provide a cost-effective and valuable solution to farmers that they can implement into their farms today, rather than having to make huge architectural changes to implement alternative robotic solutions. 

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What are some other relevant metrics of the company (production quantity, team size, etc.)?

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Our technology has the potential to redefine the industry by unlocking the scalable expansion of mushroom farms in North America and globally. By using state-of-the-art machine learning approaches, we can significantly reduce crop loss, reduce operating costs by 20%, and increase yields by 30%. Although we're early stage, we have been backed by some of the largest global investors and deployed our systems with some of the most reputable farms in the continent and have secured expert advisory in industries from robotics to mycology. 

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What are some goals in 2024 and beyond for Mycro Harvest?

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Mycro Harvest is at an exciting point in our development. Over the next year, we're scaling up production of our monitoring solution to serve some of the largest specialty mushroom farms in the continent. We will continue to develop our core technology to make it widely available to farms of all sizes to empower anyone to operate and scale their mushroom production facilities.

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How can people connect with you or learn more about Mycro Harvest?

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The best way to reach out to us to learn more about our mission and reach us is through our website. We check our messages frequently to connect with like-minded people who are passionate about helping build the future of fungi. Anyone interested in contributing to our mission can submit a message to us at www.mycroharvest.com

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