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34


COMPOST Logical expansion


Enterprise is in Teun (Tony) Kampen’s DNA. Twelve years ago he established a mushroom farm in Malaysia. Since that time his empire has steadily expanded, a process in which each new activity is a logical extension of existing ones. Shasta B.V. is another logical addition. By Roel Dreve


The story begins in Malaysia. Kampen, originally from Bakel, left the Netherlands when he was 18, and was working for a software company called Exact in Asia around the millennium. The company left Asia, but he wanted to stay and started looking for what he calls a ‘repeat business’. He was already passionate about mushrooms, but with his drive the ultimate business venture could have been practically anything. The result, however, was Champ Fungi. “There weren’t any locally grown mushrooms, the only mushrooms available were poor quality, and compost was unavailable. There was no rice straw for raw material or bagasse either. I did some research in the Netherlands. DTO exported phase II compost from the Netherlands to Japan, so importing to Malaysia was possible too. We built six growing rooms, although we really needed nine, and Wim Goossen ar- rived for an internship.”


Better compost The phase II supplied by Dutch Trading Office had to incubate in the sea container, but Kampen thought the results were very unreliable. DTO was unwilling to ship phase III for fear of the compost burning or arriving rock solid at the destination. “We then tried it ourselves and – after a lot of trial and error – the results exceeded our expectations. The yield and quality of the mushrooms increased in leaps and bounds. DTO came and had a look and then started shipping phase III too.” Champ Fungi started feeling heavy competition on the market from Indonesian conserved products, so the prices experienced downward pressure. Loading the compost blocks was very labour intensive and the compost was still of uneven quality. The whole process had to be streamlined and optimised: how to fit in more compost using less labour? “Plus, we were still way too dependent on an irregular supply of CNC blocks with spawned phase II, which didn’t fit into the containers properly. When Fred Horlings moved from CNC to Walkro, we went to Walkro Belgium. They had an Alpi block press, which could produce the sizes we wanted. It reduced our costs and we were less dependent.”


Vacuum cooling But then the shipping company decided to stop carrying compost. The fact that a few overheated containers had had to be dumped overboard probably contributed, but there weren’t many other alternatives forms of transport “This led to the idea of vacuum cooling. Using CO2 cooling kept the core of the blocks warm. Loading these blocks was a race against the clock. They were loaded by hand and sometimes 200 out of the 1100 blocks were


burnt and useless. Then we started incorporating vacu- um chambers with a pump into the containers. These experiments were not always an unqualified success. In fact once we were faced with an imploding chamber! In the chambers we cool the pallets holding the compost blocks from, say, 22 degrees to 0 degrees Celsius in one hour. You lose about 1.2 % water, slightly more than with CO2 cooling, but in all other respects the product stays exactly the same. We finally succeeded about three and a half years ago, and the results were amazing: 1400 blocks now fitted into one container, instead of 1100, and they could be loaded using a forklift instead of manually. And to cap it all, no more compost was going to waste: the blocks didn’t arrive burnt. We can even hold stocks in Malaysia for a month or two – in addition to the five week journey- without the quality deteriorating!”


Dutch branch The next step quickly followed. “We ‘begged’ DTO to invest in a new block press and to continue trials with our system, but to no avail”. So Kampen sent people from Malaysia to the Netherlands to set up the system, for which a patent application has been filed, in Venray. The company became known as Shasta B.V., in 2011. The same plan is about to be launched in Hong Kong. The cost of the compost currently used by the company in Malaysia is 30-40% lower according to Kampen. “So it was no surprise that once we had a branch in the Netherlands we were flooded with requests to do the same for third parties. Composters are now on the lookout themselves for similar systems.” It was a costly undertaking, but Kampen now says it was a ‘very good investment’. For the European market the compost is pressed into bales of 1 by 1.10 metres weighing 1200 kg. These bales are unsuitable for overseas destinations due to their size. After being cooled to 0 degrees, the bales do not have to be transported in a cooled container. The brief transit period means that on arrival at the customer the com- post temperature is no higher than ‘about 8 degrees’. For overseas transport, the compost is pressed into blocks of 20-22 kg, palletised per forty, and loaded 1400 per container, which converts to 30 tons of compost per container. These containers are cooled. “We mainly do this for our own use, but also for CNC, Coenegrachts and occasionally other composters, if the customers ask. We process some 2500 tons per month here in Venray.” Kampen predicts a doubling of production in the short term, using the same machinery and labour. According to him there is a rising worldwide demand for good quality compost as so many new mushroom


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