My own business · Leelanau County, MI

Controls and monitoring for a mushroom farm

A note on this one: Opalcap Mushrooms is mine. It’s a culinary mushroom farm I run out of my pole barn in Leelanau County with my business partner, Jackson. I’m including it because it’s the clearest example of the industrial side of what I do — and because unlike a client project, I’m the one who gets the alert when a room goes out of range.

The problem

A mushroom grow room is a process that can’t take a day off. Temperature, humidity, CO2, and airflow all have to hold within range, continuously. Let conditions drift for long enough and the crop isn’t reduced. It’s lost.

Checking a gauge a few times a day isn’t enough. Conditions have to be controlled automatically, recorded continuously, and visible from anywhere.

What’s running it

Industrial controllers. The control logic runs on PLCs — programmable logic controllers, the same class of hardware that runs factory floors. They were chosen for one reason: they run for years without attention. A controller that needs babysitting defeats the purpose.

A data layer on top of the hardware. Readings are logged rather than shown and discarded, so the history can be analyzed. The hardware keeps the rooms in range; the data layer is what makes the operation measurable.

Monitoring from anywhere. Conditions in every room are visible from a phone, so checking on the farm doesn’t mean driving to it and problems are caught early.

Dashboards on site. On-premises dashboards pull insight out of that history — what actually correlates with a good yield, rather than what anyone assumes matters.

The electrical work. Licensed and high-voltage electrical work is performed by Power Concepts, a licensed master electrician with 40 years in the trade. My part is the controls, the data, and the monitoring built on top.

Why this matters if you run a production floor

The farm is where I prove this out on my own crops, with my own money on the line.

The same combination — industrial control hardware, a data layer that makes it legible, and remote visibility — applies well beyond mushrooms. A production floor. A commercial kitchen. A cold storage room. Any process where conditions have to hold, and somebody currently checks a gauge by hand.

If that describes something in your building, you probably already know which gauge it is.