u Natal
Delegates at Forest Mushrooms. Rob Stewart (in blue shirt) is the owner of the farm.
Name change & pink punnets As usual the students involved in the research funded by SAMFA, reported on their work. It includes a study on Cobweb Disease, the Development of Food Safety Diagnostic Systems and Farm Health Checks whereby the disease status of a farm can be determined by molecular identification of swabs and samples. A presentation on the upkeep of the fungal culture col- lection was very informative. The new rule for naming fungi was explained, whereby fungi with pleomorphic life cycles will from now on only have one name with the oldest taking preference. So it happened that the names of a few pathogens common to the commercial mushroom industry has changed. Verticillium fungi- cola has changed to Lecanicillium fungicola. Cobweb disease’s new scientific name from now on will be Hypomyces rosellus and Wet Bubble disease will be Hypomyces rosellus. A substantial portion of the SAMFA levies goes into the generic marketing of mushrooms. Riana Greenblo Communications is running a PR campaign for the past 12 years. The focus remains on getting the message out that mushrooms are healthy and nutritious, recipe deve- lopment to include the nutritional analysis and a cost analysis of the recipes, media send-outs like ‘meatless Mondays’ and ‘what’s for dinner’, media health updates, social media (face book & bloggers), the Pink Punnet project in support of the fight against breast cancer and the list goes on. Production and sales figures presented at the Annual General Meeting held at the end of the conference, showed an increase of between 6-7% in production and sales during the past four years.
Forest Mushrooms The programme also included a visit to Forest Mushrooms a very neat family owned business about
an hour’s drive inland from the coast. It is a relatively new, bulk phase II operation, that has recently been changed from bags to a shelve system. The bale dunking invention drew attention, whereby bales are fitted onto a frame and hydraulically dunked into a goody water pit. For watering the beds an automatic sprinkling system is installed that can be set to water the beds at any specific time of the day or night at a set amount. After harvesting mushrooms are kept in a ‘shock’ room whereby the mushrooms are cooled to 2 degrees Celsius prior to packing. ◗
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Compost turner, with Emiel Lacet (Christiaens Group) and Morris Gilbert from Country Mushrooms (r).
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