CHINA Big, bigger, biggest!
In the past years, an absolutely massive farm has been built to grow white mushrooms close to Guannan, in Jiangsu province in the east of China. Why here, and why so big? Jackie Qi, Vice General Manager and head of
sales explains. By John Peeters
This photo shows all of the six blocks of growing rooms. One team is responsible for filling all the growing rooms (middle of the photo).
iangsu Yuguan Modern Agricultural Scien- tific & Technology Co. Ltd. Quite a mouthful, but if you proclaim yourself to be the biggest mushroom growing farm on a single site in the world, then the name is certainly not too long. The president of the company is Jianguang Huang, who has more than earned his spurs in processing and selling mushrooms.” Mr Huang has been in the mushroom business for 30 years. In the 1980s he started buying up mushrooms from small- scale growers before reselling the mushrooms to the canning industry in China, mainly in the south east of the region around the city of Zhangzhou. After a while he started his own canning plant”. Zhangzhou also happens to be the birthplace of Jianguang Huang. Since the 1980s, the region surrounding the city has become a centre for white mushroom cultivation in China. “After Mr Huang founded a factory there, he started to export worldwide. The business prospered to such
J 14 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
an extent that Huang also invested in a factory in Sichuan, a region in central China that also has high mushroom production. This made him the major exporter of conserved mushrooms in China”, according to Qi. During the peak era of exports of conserved mushrooms from China, up to 70% of his production was destined for the USA. During his visits to many customers abroad, Huang started to realise that the traditional Chinese methods of mushroom growing were not viable in the long-term. Qi explains: “A tradi- tional mushroom grower in China has one or two sheds for seasonal, winter growing. The summers are too hot, and growers do not have any form of cooling, so cultivation ceases. Some growers might have an oil drum to pasteurise some compost in the room, and produce no more than five tons a year for the conserving industry. China is home to an estimated 0.5 million mushroom growers, who all use traditional methods.”
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