PV solar panels at Willems BV Agar- icus mushroom farm in Kessel, one of the largest PV panel arrays in The Netherlands.
Photo: Jan Gielen, DLV Plant Mushrooms
hot weather are ways in which these systems work at the very moment an advantage is recognized. Even design of rooms, intelligent us of insulation, more sophisticated chilled water systems, and advanced air handlers have reduced the cooling/electricity requirement per ton of mushrooms grown. Cooling systems are also augmented in different ways. Some farms in Holland use ground water for cooling, or at least to pretreat air. Then once the ground water is used it is returned to the water table so as not to upset the natural order of things. At Ore- gon Trail Mushrooms we used a geothermal resource for heating and cooling purposes as well as other applications. Finally the final waste product of mushroom growing, spent mushroom substrate (see also front page and article on page 4), is not a waste product at all. It has been shown in many research experiments to have fabulous properties for gardening, landscaping, soil amending, toxic waste amelioration, insulation, green roof formulations, et cetera. I mentioned above that farm wastewater can be recycled into the composting cycle because of re- duced chemical usage. Because of food safety issues the most persistent and dangerous pesticides and sanitizing agents have been take away from us. Plus the chemical industry’s reluctance to license more. Indeed this has been a blessing in disguise because it has forced us into better, more environmentally friendly techniques for pest management. Better clean up, integrated pest management systems, improved structural integrity of mushroom houses, shorter cropping cycles, and less dangerous sani- tizing agents has allowed us to become almost de facto organic growers. Finally I even take an environmentally friendly ap- proach in executing the responsibilities of my job as a cultural advisor to mushroom farms. It is my job to help farms be successful, but within that I take it as my charge to make each farm as efficient and pro- ductive as possible. My personal objective is to help
each client extract as many pounds of mushrooms as possible from each ton of raw material, in the simplest, most streamlined way. In this way the farm is successful and I am successful because I’ve done the job for the client and myself. It is some kind of industry that can take waste pro- ducts, using nothing more than water, some energy, labor, and facility and produce a healthy, tasty, special human food product. Modern alchemists are what we are! Having said that, as much progress as we’ve made there are still chips on the table. In fact Europe is ahead of us with respect to environ- mentally friendliness. So it is true that there are still efficiencies to be had, techniques to be used, impro- vements to be made, and environmental impact to be reduced. Some of them are known and will be used; some are works in progress, and some we don’t even know yet. What is known is that industry, particularly ours, inexorably follows a path toward simplicity and efficiency. We will get there if we do what I did in coming up with this article, think small, but don’t be afraid to Think Big!
This article was first published by Mushroom News, without the photos on these pages.◗
Compost tunnel fans run 24/7. At Gicom in The Netherlands, one of the innovations they focus on, are more aerodynamic fans with less resistance in the ducting, and high ef- ficiency electromotors fitted in the fans, which both lead to energy savings. Photo: Roel Dreve
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