Compost windrows are turned by hand.
Mixing casing soil at Sunil Malik’s white button mushroom farm in Murthal. The women carry the casing on the head and put it on the beds by hand. In the background, a typical thatched mushroom shed.
Traditional song and dance at the Farewell Dinner. The songs and stories, told by the singer, were about the love affair of Krishna and Radha.
INDIA Field visit ICMBMP8
On the last day of the ICMBMP8 in Delhi, a field visit was organised to Haryana, a state adjoining the capital, with the highest button mushroom
output as a seasonal activity. By Roel Dreve
T
here are not many climatised farms around Delhi. In Haryana, seasonal cultivation started in the 1980s. Pro- duction is concentrated in the winter season, starting from October until March, when some 10,000 tons are cultivated. Typically, mushrooms are grown very basically, on beds in thatched huts made of recyclable bamboo, paddy straw and polythene sheets. Compost is made (rice straw, wheat straw) in neat windrows on site and turned by hand some six times until the ammonia has disappeared (20-25 days). Casing is made on the basis of rice husks and applied on the spot as well. On average, growers produce one or two crops without flushes, and obtain a 20-25 kg yield per 100 kg compost. Some of them construct 50-100 sheds each year, as everything is packed up and relocated for the start of a new season to avoid disease build-up. The delegates were welcomed to Mr Sunil Malik’s farm in Murthal (Sonepat District), where he started mushroom cultivation in 2000. He constructs some 80-100 sheds every year, where 200 tons of white button mushrooms are produced by 100 workers.
HAIC and Farewell Dinner Next, we visited HAIC Agro R&D Centre in Murthal, where growers from the region can follow training in cultivation and spawn production technology, get advice and analysis of compost and disease samples, and buy spawn, pasteurised compost and casing material. In the past, growers suffered heavy losses due to diseases spreading in the crops because the compost was made using conventional methods. With the modern spawn lab, testing facility, compost yard, casing soil pasteurisation chamber, two demonstration growing rooms, a hostel for trainees and a lot of effort, HAIC aims to lift mushroom growing in Haryana to a higher level. For more info visit
www.haic.co. HAIC organised the Farewell Dinner buffet for delegates of the ICMBMP8 at a local tourist resort, where we enjoyed Indian cuisine and traditional music and dance. Then, it was time to hit the road to Delhi and catch our planes.
In the next issue, we visit more growers, spawn makers and training facilities, as well as the largest fruit & vegetable market in Asia, in and around Delhi.
Ñ MUSHROOM BUSINESS 37
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