GERMANY
The phase IV hall, with left the tray fi lling line and growing rooms on the right. The packing line has an output of 285,000 punnets of mushrooms weekly.
a very important theme in Germany, and one which many people cling to and identify with. But there really are just too many quality marks in circulation. And you can also ask to what extent a dairy cow grazing in a local meadow, typically regional, may be fed with soya meal produced in Brazil?” Klingmann Works for “Regionalfenster”, an organisation that aims to delineate and better describe what regionality means by defining the term. “For mushrooms that means that our definition is that casing soil and compost must be produced and filled in a German region. Only in that case can we speak of regional mushroom production.” The final speaker of the day was Jack Lemmen, director of GTL. He apologised in advance because it was the first time he had ever given a speech to such a large audience, and for what he considered to be his poor knowledge of German. The apologies were completely unnecessary, and Lemmen involved the audience in his speech by asking technical questions. “To limit the energy loss in thick cables, you have to keep the cables short, for example by placing the transformer in the centre of the building used to make compost.” He also stated that what con- struction companies do with climate installations is often ‘worse than Volkswagen tampering with software, because we consciously integrate brakes so the capacity for cooling is well distributed. But this is at the expense of the capacity!’
Havelland Champignon After the party on Friday evening, the group reported on a chilly Saturday morning in Tietzow, some 40 kilometres north west of Berlin, for a visit to the three sites of the Dohme group situated there. Gerard van de Wijdeven welcomed the group and explained about the companies. DPZ Dohme Pilzzucht makes compost and produces pinned trays – i.e. from phase I to phase IV inclusive. The plant at the back of the gigantic plot has a capacity of 3000 tons of phase I com-
10 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
‘Is a cow ‘regional’ when she is fed with Brazilian soya meal?’
post, and uses seven bunkers which can hold 700 tons of raw materials for production. It was built in 2013. The initial blend is currently still supplied by Verschoor, but the company will soon start their own production. The company has some 20 tunnels at its disposal for production of phase II and III compost, each with a capacity of 160 tons, and at the moment 800 tons of inoculated substrate is produced a week. Of this, 600 tons is conventionally produced and the remaining 200 tons is organic. This compost is used to fill 2500 steel trays, with a growing surface of 2.7 square metres each, every week. The trays are then placed in the ten growing rooms where they are left to develop to phase IV, whereby 25% of the yield is brown mushrooms. The spawn used is varieties Sylvan A15 and Hollander/Italspawn FB29. The same site is also home to Havelland Champignon, the picking company, which is supplied with 75% of the trays. The other 25% is sold to external buyers. Havelland produces approximately 100 tons of mushrooms in a two-week cycle. The two flushes are picked in the 27 growing rooms, that each hold 180 trays. After picking, the rooms are cooked out. The mush- rooms are then sold to Dohme Pilzvertrieb. They take care of the packing and sales, with a weekly output of 285,000 punnets. A total of more than 200 employees work at the three companies. A very interesting tour of a unique company, that has also opted for a tray growing system on this relatively new site.
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