Bags stacked eight high in the growing rooms. At Khanna Mushroom Farm.
Manoj Kumar (standing, fourth from left) and some of the labourers. In the back- ground, right, the casing soil pit, and behind that a shed being constructed.
shelves, with 975 plastic bags of 13 kg with compost and casing soil – made by the grower using coco coir as peat is unavailable in India. The only thing regulated in the climatised growing rooms is the temperature. The crop yields some 18-20% in a six-week harvesting period, in two to three flushes.
Khanna produces six tons of mushrooms each month, and sells his crop at the wholesale market in Delhi. “At ten in the evening we drive in our - unchilled - truck to the market and by four in the morning we have sold everything.” The farm employs 15 people and tentative expansion plans are in place.
Manoj Kumar Mushroom Farm Our final stop was a farm growing mushrooms on a seasonal basis on the Grand Trunk Road close to Gannaur, Sonepat. Just like Sunil Malik’s farm in MB68, Manoj Kumar’s production is limited to the winter season. The setup is not static, but moves to a different plot of rented land each time. There is no mains water or power connec- tion, and all the work is done manually. When we arrived, the labourers were busy constructing sheds from bamboo poles. In September, they start preparing the compost based on a blend of soybeans, rice straw, wheat bran, straw and fer- tilizer, phosphate, urea, but no chicken manure. The compost is piled up outdoors for 20 to 25 days, and turned and sprayed regularly. No phase II process takes place; the compost is fermented
until all the ammonia has disappeared. The casing soil is also a colourful pick and mix of ingredients, including cow manure that is mixed/ composted in a pit with rice husks, lime, formalin and sometimes soil.
The resulting blend is filled into sheds (12) that are covered with polythene and rice straw. The sheds contain three tiers of bamboo shelves, with the floor also used a growing space. Each ‘room’ is filled with five tons of compost (in an 8-10 cm layer on the beds) and, judging by the smell, a dose of insecticide. The spawn, an A15 variant, comes from the HAIC in Murthal (see MB69). The harvesting period runs for 10 weeks with no flushes – they pick what emerges on the beds. According to the grower, who is also active in real estate, the yield is 1.5 to 2 tons mush- rooms/ 5 tons compost. “Marketing people from Jammu in the north collect the fresh mushrooms from us, some 300 to 400 kg a day. We get 120 rupees (1.69 euro or 1.93 USD) per kg; they sell it for 200 to 300 rupees per kilo, often in 200-gram packaging.”
At peak season 18 people, mainly recruited from the east of India, work on the farm. They are not paid a daily wage, but receive 30% of the sales price. They sleep in sheds on site.
When the winter season ends (February/March), and temperatures start to rise, the sheds are dismantled so they can be assembled again next growing season in another location, ‘to prevent diseases’.
MUSHROOM BUSINESS 37
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