As we mentioned back at the beginning of March, we got a grant from the Lakewinds Organic Field Fund (through the Lakewinds Food Co-op). With the funds we purchased the Okuda “Pegasus” Semi-Automatic Inoculation Tool. Sounds fancy, huh? It is actually pretty fancy!
Okuda is a Japanese company and they make these inoculator machines individually, by hand. It’s remarkably simple and complex at the same time. Last month Jeremy and I drove to Peshtigo in eastern Wisconsin to pick up the Pegasus. It was shipped to our spawn suppliers (and friends) over at Field and Forest Products. We spent a few hours looking over their Pegasus, taking it for a spin, taking videos, and asking lots of questions. We then loaded up our van with a ton of spawn (probably not literally a ton, but maybe close!) and our precious new Pegasus.
It was a couple weeks till we could really start using it because we really needed to collect the rest of the logs to inoculate before the logging site became impassable. But, Jeremy and our new employee have been inoculating for the last couple weeks. It will probably take another week or two to work out all the kinks and get the Pegasus perfectly tuned, but it’s going well so far.
Here it is in action on day 1 – new machine, and our new employee Cyle!
For you number crunchers, we inoculated 1,081 logs from November of last year through January. We started inoculations up again this month and have done 777 so far, doing 70-100 logs on each inoculation day. We’re hoping to build up to 125 logs a day as we get used to the tool.
Our goal is to finish inoculations by the end of May (if not earlier) and we have a ways to go as Jeremy has about 2,640 logs still left to do. Wish us luck!
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