INDIA
Welkin Overseas: cleaning and packing hall.
Welkin Overseas: Naveen, Vikas and Amit with mushroom in commercial packaging.
a small compost yard and a couple of growing rooms. The two spawn labs – one state-owned and the other owned by the university- supply small volumes of spawn to the summer growers. At the time of our visit, activity was at a low, probably because of the conference in Delhi.
Welkin Overseas
After the ICMBMP8 we visited Naveen Patwal, his wife Poonam Sharma and Amit Sharma from Welkin Overseas. They have located their company in a strategic position in Roorkee, Uttarakhand, 170 km north of Delhi. “We started in 2010, with the ambition to produce high quality mushrooms all year round so as to respond to the growing demand. Our main target market is New Delhi. As we are in the lowlands, where the climate is unfavourable to production for six months, we invested straightway in insulated growing rooms and a good climate installation. We already have a chiller with a cooling capacity of 180 tons.” Naveen and Amit, just like Vikas, control each aspect of the production chain. We were impressed by the spawn lab: there is a top-of- the-range double-door autoclave that opens into a meticulously spotless clean room, and we couldn’t find any fault with the end product. In summer, Welkin produces 150 tons of compost per month, and in winter 200 tons, of which 50 tons is for sale. Ten growing rooms, each of 300 m², produce 24 tons of mushrooms monthly. Partly due to the outstanding collaboration with Vikas, they can guarantee their customers mushrooms of consistent quality. Sales are on the up, so expansion is a logical move. “In 2015 we are building ten new growing rooms each of 675m², and plan to add another ten in 2016, while 2017 will see modern tunnels for phase
30 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
3 compost production. These expansions will increase our production capacity several times over, and give better standardisation of our end product. We can then focus fully on selling the compost to third parties.”
Spawn producers
A particularly interesting part of our tour was visiting some more or less commercially-based spawn labs, a random selection of the hundreds of labs that India is rich in. As well as the labs already mentioned, we visited Mr Mann, who only produces spawn during the growing season, and Swadeshi Mushroom Spawn in Delhi (see page 34). Welkin and Swadeshi are permanently active. They all operate in accordance with the rustic production system promoted by the Directorate. Thin, polypropylene bags are filled with one kilo of cooked wheat and sealed by a ring and cotton wool plug. At the seasonal labs, these bags are loaded into single-door auto- claves and then removed by the same people, with all the inherent risks of infection. The most advanced spawn labs, such as Swadeshi and Welkin, have double-door autoclaves which open into a hygienic room after sterilisation. Inoculation is done under a laminar flow and the bags are incubated in cleaned rooms, that are not equipped with positive pressure as standard. During cooling and incubation the cotton wool plugs are the most critical factor. However, as mushroom production, and that of spawn, is a mainly seasonal activity, potential outbreaks of infection can be kept under control. There is a loss of around 3%, which seems reasonable under these less than optimal conditions. As the number of professional farms grows, the need for training and advice on how to improve the technology of spawn production is rising too.
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