By Roel Dreve CONSULTANTS 3
From growing and composting to consultancy: Jos Buth
This year we published the 100th edition of Mushroom Business. Several cultivation consultants have been of integral importance to the success of our publications and have been involved from day one. We talk to them about the - often underexposed - nature of their work, changes in the sector and their writing talents.
Y
ou can roughly divide the 50-year career of Joris (Jos) Buth (1953) into two parts: For the first 30 years he worked at various mushroom farms and tunnel companies in the Netherlands and Europe; for the last 20 years he has worked as a consultant, initially for Cpoint, later as an independent consultant. His passion for mushrooms dates from the practical training he followed at a mushroom farm in the late 1960s but his fascination for composting started at a much more tender age. Similar to many collea- gues, the scope of his work became increasingly international. He now lives in Chile, the base for his consultancy activities in North and South America.
Childhood
“When I was eight years old, my father made me muck out a calf and a pig every Saturday. And what I saw in the pile of manure really interested me. I found actinomycetes in the compost and my attention was captured because those white patches in the pile no longer smelled of ammonia. I regularly started turning over the pile of manure with a fork to see if I could get rid of all the ammonia. My father remarked that I seemed more interested in the manure than in the animals”. Jos studied at the lower and secondary horticul- tural college in Nijmegen from 1964 to 1970. “As part of our practical training we worked on a mushroom farm. All at once I realised my destiny was to be a mushroom grower! My first job was filling a growing room with fresh compost - and that’s always been my favourite part of the whole cultivation process.” A logical next step was the CCO (Practical Trai- ning College for Mushroom Growing), where he spent two years studying the entire cultivation process and specialised in composting. “We attended college one day a week, and for the rest of the time I worked at a typically Dutch farm, which first produced for the fresh market and later for the processing industry. In the beginning we filled phase I compost produced by the cooperative, and later phase III compost.”
Grower and composter Jos at work: 50 years and counting. 42 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
Jos then worked in Germany from 1979 to 1984, as a grower on a mushroom farm where phase II and III were also produced, and then worked for six years at a farm used by a supplier of mecha- nical harvesting systems as a trial location. Here too he produced phase II and III compost. This was followed by work on projects in Austria and Germany for a producer of tunnels for the waste processing industry. “One of the aims here was
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