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MALTA A tower of mushrooms
If you stand in front of the new premises owned by Noel and Louise Debono in Malta you would never image that the building is home to a mushroom farm. However, this fi ve storey building was constructed to grow mushrooms for the local market.
By Erik de Groot, Mushroom & Substrate Consultancy
Alongside the fruit and vegetable trading company run by Noel and Louise in the building, the majority of the space is devoted to mushroom growing. The market in Malta is not all that sizeable – the island numbers around 400,000 inhabitants – but if you add the one million visitors annually, then mushroom consumption is potentially good. The problem was finding a reliable supplier of good quality mushrooms all year round. This led to the plan for a new production site.
Limited space The first question that springs to mind is why build a multi-storey mushroom farm and not a traditional style with a low building, a central corridor and a large yard? The answer is quite logical – Malta is one of the smal- lest and most densely populated countries in the world, with 1300 people per km2, a scarcity of land and what there is available is very expensive. So the only way of setting up a farm for a reasonable investment was to make the best use of the available space. In 2009, when Noel and Louise drew up their plans, they
knew nothing at all about mushroom growing. They decided to go abroad on a fact-finding mission to in- vestigate the options. They soon came into contact with Hans Nendels from BVB Euroveen and visited farms and climate control unit suppliers in the Netherlands. Not everyone was immediately enthusiastic about building a farm like this, but it did become clear that the plan was feasible. A restricting factor was that more things would have to be done manually. Filling, casing and emptying are normally mechanised on most farms, but the shape of the building in Malta makes that im- possible. Mushroom and Substrate Consultancy was in- volved to supervise and start up the plan, the shelving, lorries and other picking equipment were sourced in Italy and AEM ended up supplying the climate units. The heating and cooling installations were installed by local companies.
Multi-storey So how does it work? The building has five storeys, with a large lift forming the heart of the building. This lift can
Noel and Louise
Debono’s multi-storey building on an industri- al estate in Malta.
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