The line that mixes the six ingredients for the substrate.
The bags with substrate are sterilised in an autoclave.
Greg Seymour also paid a visit to Xiangru Xu.
flour, 10% maize flour and 20% wheatmeal. Calcium carbonate and calcium super carbonate, both at a rate of 1%, are also added to balance the pH. Xu: “This mixture will soon be produced in a computer-controlled process, and filled into bags weighing 1250 grams. These bags will then be sterilised in an autoclave and mixed with spawn in a clean room, where many hands make light work. “At the new farm, an automatic line will be installed to do the inoculation. At the moment it’s still a very laborious manual task”, Xu explains, “and after inoculation, the bags are taken to the incubation rooms. Incubation takes 38 days with solid spawn, which is reduced to 30 days if we use liquid spawn. Incubation takes place at a temperature of between 22 to 24 degrees.”
Trimming
After colonisation, a forklift transports the shelves holding the bags to the picking rooms. The temperature is now slowly reduced to 13-15 degrees Celsius. “We apply a number of measu- res to encourage pinheading”, says Xu, “the influence of light, shaking the bags, reducing the RH and the temperature. Our total cycle time in the picking rooms is 18 days. We trim away some
of the smaller mushrooms on day 13-14, pick the mushrooms that emerge before the main flush on day 16, and harvest the larger mushrooms – which sell best – on days 17 and 18. We sometimes have problems with green mould, but we try to avoid using chemicals any more. The magic words here are hygiene and good manage- ment. Our yield is around 40% of the substrate weight and 100% of the dry matter, at an average of 470 grams of king oyster mushrooms per bag of substrate.”
Market
Xu is confident about the future: “All the mushrooms are sold on the fresh market in China. I estimate that the market can currently cope with 1400 tons a day, and project that figure at 2200 tons a day in four years’ time. The market is rapidly growing, and upscaling of farms will accelerate too. I am very satisfied with my new plans and developments aimed at increasing automation. I adore working with mushrooms and I now totally understand what the famous Chinese Professor Huang meant when he said that “speaking with mushrooms gives boundless joy”. The more you grow them, the more you agree with his words.”
MUSHROOM BUSINESS 31
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