BANKING ON MUSHROOMS
That sensuous fungus which never fails to set your taste buds salivating never would fail to make you rich the only condition being you nurture it well. And now you don’t need to go anywhere for tips. MoneyQuin brings you a lowdown on farming mushrooms.
To begin with, make sure that the place where you intend to start the farming activity is easily accessible by road, has ample supply of power, water, labour, and raw material like wheat straw, paddy straw, chicken manure, sugarcane bagasse etc. Also consider proximity to the market where the product will be sold, adequate insulation of cropping rooms with air handling unit attached to each growing room to maintain proper temperature during various stages of cultivation. Ensure proper circulation of air in the crop room to reduce concentration of carbon dioxide. Install humidifiers in growing rooms to maintain humidity at favourable level.
Next you need to jerk the botanist in you. Study about types of mushrooms, quality of spawn, wheat and paddy straw, sugarcane bagasse and chicken manure. It’s the quality of spawn which decides the yield of mushroom. You also need to know which type of mushroom would grow in what conditions. For instance, Button mushrooms, Agaricus bisporus and A. bitorquis, grow on compost prepared by aerobic fermentation of cereal straws and animal manures, unlike Pleurotus and Volvariella which grow directly on unfermented cellulosic materials.
Preparing the Farm
Mushroom farming is an indoor activity with altogether different set of rules and demanding exclusive expertise. Patches of farm area have to be prepared for various activities –composting, spawn making, cropping, and post-harvest handling.
For button mushrooms, the process involves composing (substrate preparation), spawn preparation (seed), and cropping and the infrastructure looks as follows:
INFRASTRUCTURE FOR COMPOSTING
Composting Yard: For compost preparation and Phase-I of short method composting. Ideally, it should spread over 120’ x 60’ x 15’ of area.
Pasteurisation Tunnel: For phase-II which involves pasteurisation and conditioning. There should be two such rooms each 40’ x 10’ x 13’ in size. Each tunnel has two doors one for filling in the compost and the other for spawning.
Growing Room: For growing the crops
Air condition room: For keeping compressor, cooling tank, motor and electric panel
Boiler room: This patch is used for pasteurising the compost
Generator room: To station gen-set and diesel
Equipment /machinery room: To keep the equipment required for mushroom farm
Water tank: To store fresh water required to soak mushrooms
Packaging room: Here the mushrooms are packaged
Casing pasteurization room: This corner is required for pasteurization of casing soil
SPAWN MAKING UNIT:
Spread over 90’ x 30’ x 13’, the spawn making unit comprises:
- Boiling and sterilization room: This room is equipped with a boiling kettle and autoclave. The crop is washed, boiled and sterilised in this room.
- Inoculation room: Laminar flow enables inoculation of pure culture into bottles for preparation of master spawn and further multiplication of master spawn into commercial one.
- Incubation room: Master and commercial spawn are shifted to the incubation room for growth and colonization of fungal mycelium. This room is fitted with air conditioner. Therefore, temperature of this room could be adjusted as per requirement of mushroom species.
- Spawn storage room: Fully colonized mushroom spawn is shifted to storage room where temperature is maintained to 40C.
SETTING UP THE BED
The beds for growing mushrooms are styled to suit the environs and depend on logistics and resources. Three styles are generally used – shelf system; tray system; and bag system. In technically advanced countries, tray system is more common though shelf system is considered the oldest. In India, bag system is more popular.
Here’s a brief explanation of the three styles:
- Shelf system: The shelf is wooden and is 5’ wide and 1-1.5” thick to ensure it can bear the weight of compost. The selves are placed at least 1½’ apart to help water spraying, casing, harvesting of mushrooms.
- Tray system: Like shelves, trays are also wooden. Handy and portable, the size of a tray is half square meter and 6” deep which is enough to accommodate 28-32 kg compost. Wood sticks sized 1½ x 14” should be placed over the tray so that the other tray can be easily placed over another.
- Bag system: Most popular in India, in this system, compost is filled in 25”X 23” size polythene bags of 200 gauge thickness. If these bags are kept on the floor, the area for crop production will be reduced. Therefore, shelves are made within crop rooms to keep these bags. There’s no ‘cookout’ process involved in this system. In the cookout process, the temperature of the crop room is raised upto 700 C for 10-12 hrs after the end of the crop. This is done to ensure proper sterilization of the crop room so that the next crop will be free from insects and pests.
Crop Room: A crop room is built to store compost upto 25 tons. About this much compost is produced after phase two. A crop, to hold this much compost should be 16’ x 23’ x 11’ three-tier arrangement.
The Money:
The approximate cost of setting up a mushroom farm is Rs 1 crore. This includes salaries of employees, buying land and developing it, civil works, compost unit, production and processing facility and spawn laboratory and office block. About 1.5 acre land is required for cultivating mushrooms.
So if you are thinking of taming this fungus, this is the right time.
