CHINA
The compost plant with nine bunkers and 31 tunnels.
At an outside temperature of 40 degrees you need some form of cooling.
equation. Jackie Qi explains: “Lemmen believed in the company right from the word go. He said straightaway that he needed a partner so he could deliver everything we needed, which is how Hoving became involved.” At the time, even before the foundation of GTL, a collaborative partnership was established under the name LeHo. The cooperation between Huang and Jack Lemmen is still going strong. Qi: “Mr Huang gets on really well with Lemmen. Lemmen is a perfectionist and so is Huang.” After various contracts were signed, 200 sea containers full of material, machines, computers and air handling installations sailed for China. The actual build- ings were constructed by Butler, an American company. And there are a lot of them. Qi: “This company is here to stay, and now half of it is up and running in production, something that many would never have believed possible. If we run at full production, we can produce 800,000 kg of white mushrooms every week. The farm is sub-divided into six blocks, each of 24 growing rooms. We started using one of these blocks at the end of 2014, so we had the first mushrooms just before Christmas. Now, almost a year later, we have three blocks in production. We intend to start block four before the end of this year, and the remaining two blocks in 2016. To do so, we need to expand the composting capacity.” In order to realise this complex operation, the assistance was sought of cultivation specialists from the Netherlands at the very start. The task was ultimately shouldered by Bart Driessen and Theo Haegens, and they have been involved in the project from the beginning. They are not alone. Haegens and Driessen also chartered the help of
16 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
Johan Hoekstra, Thei Staaks, John Peeters and Ron Neelen. Via a rota system, there have always been two cultivation and compost specialists on site since the beginning to help supervise this enormous project. Qi: “No one knows better than the Dutch consultants how to deal with the intri- cacies of this huge task. Of course we had to clear some hurdles in the early stages, and we are sure to encounter problems in the future, but we are extremely satisfied about the input and guidance from the Dutch. We intend to continue with a long-term form of cooperation. We are currently producing an average of 29 kg/square metre, and we are noticing a rising line. There is room for growth in production, but at the moment it’s pretty good. Don’t forget, we are the world’s largest mushroom farm on just a single site.”
Market
If you draw a circle with a radius of 600 km around the farm, you cover nine provinces in China with more than 200 million inhabitants. Qi continues: “Urban conglomerations like Shanghai and Beijing have a demographic with a relatively high income. The market there is huge. In Shanghai alone, 200 tons of mushrooms are sold daily. If you really think about it, our farm is actually too small. We do have to educate the market though, improve on it. We have to communicate that we do not use any chemical substances during production – something that is virtually unheard of here in this country. We can absolutely guarantee food safety. We must try and get away to a certain extent from the 4.5 kg baskets which nearly all the mushrooms are sold in on the fresh market, because people –
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