Casing soil in Kennett is still practically made entirely using bales of dried Canadian peat.
Inside a Pennsylvania double. Modern tunnels, but only phase II compost for the time being.
These rooms, and the shelving, are built using solid, robust wood. Composting generally takes place outdoors on old-fashioned windrows, and the growing rooms are filled with phase I compost by teams of workers using belts, rakes and wheelbarrows.
Automation
Cook-out takes place in the growing room, followed by spawning – with a minimum input of machinery and a maximum input of manual labour. The same applies to casing. The casing soil is either produced on site using Canadian peat, which is supplied in dried form in bales, or made by one of the small-scale companies that produce casing soil in Kennett, as the community is lovingly referred to by the locals. A number of companies active in the Kennett send teams – usually of Mexican heritage – to the local farms to perform this heavy manu- al labour. The yields, also thanks to the high compost filling weights, are generally very good, so mushroom growing is still a profitable exercise. Most growers are experts at culti- vating mushrooms in this very typical way. Despite the long-held traditions, the realisation is starting to grow even in Kennett that automa- ting the process is becoming more pressing. The flow of cheap labour from Mexico is being squee- zed, cheap labour is becoming more expensive and many farms have actually been written off. In recent years, more and more farms have transitioned to using the Dutch-style system of pasteurising and conditioning in tunnels. A leading example is compost producer Laurel Valley, owned by shareholders from five diffe- rent farms. A number of new farms have also
been built, some with Dutch shelving systems, where using a shorter cropping cycle with a higher production volume is cheaper. Dutch net systems are also used in these rooms to fill and empty the beds. The traditional rooms, which are inaccessible to modern head fillers, are fitted with nets under the compost to automate the emptying process. Growers also aim for higher quality mushrooms by partly using wet, black peat from Canada instead of the traditional dried, frozen peat in bales.
Spawned compost
According to Chris Alonzo, owner of Pietro Mushrooms and a shareholder in Laurel Valley, it
‘It will still take
some time before Kennett switches to phase III compost’
Bart Driessen during his presentation. MUSHROOM BUSINESS 9
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