CHINA
The Chinese domestic market seems large enough to absorb all future production volumes.
interest in automated processes. I want to set up farms that are highly automated – that reduces the labour load and gives more uniform results. On this farm, we have expanded from producing one ton a day to 80 tons, in 483 growing rooms and with some 25,000 square metres for further growth.” But Xu has even bigger plans. “I have acquired 93,000 square metres of land here that I have earmarked for expansion. Here in Guannan I want to grow production to 150 tons a day, and fill 300,000 bags with substrate daily. And I have also bought land in nearby Huaian, where I intend to fill 630,000 bags a day and hope to produce close to 350 tons of mushrooms per day on 41,0000 square metres. But I am also busy constructing a new farm in the vicinity, just three kilometres away. I will shortly be produ- cing 125 tons daily. That takes the total produc- tion of all my operations to 625 tons of king oyster mushrooms every day. All of my energy will be devoted to this in the next four years, and I am sure it will be a success.”
3000 employees
The existing farm in Guannan currently employs 560 people, including 20 growers. They also
The bags are still mainly fi lled by hand.
ensure the mushrooms are all packed and readied for transport. All the production is sold fresh on the Chinese domestic market, which seems to be large enough to absorb all future production volumes. Xu: “The market is so huge, I have no worries about finding sales. I do want to see higher levels of automation at my new farms, for example automatic systems for filling the bags with substrate or inoculation. I’ve got some really good ideas about that, which are viable in practice. I grow the mushrooms on bags of substrate. At the moment extensive automa- tion is only possible with bottle-grown mushrooms, but that is set to change. We are going to automatically inoculate and wrap the substrate blocks, but also ruffle them. I am developing machines for this purpose, some- thing I am immensely proud of. Looking to the future, with all the projected expansion, I hope to offer work to 3000 people.”
How are the mushrooms grown? “We start by producing the spawn ourselves’”, according to Xu, “by selecting and picking the best examples of mushrooms on the farm ourselves. We then separate the spores and turn them into spawn, which we test first at our trial facility. Then we make a mother culture and inoculum, and then spawn, which can take a solid or liquid form.”
Bags with substrate in the rooms where the mycelium develops.
The substrate used for the pleurotus erengyi consists of a blend of six ingredients; 20% sawdust, 20% bagasse, 20% corn cobs, 10% soy
30 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
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