By John Peeters
Cormo continues CASING SOIL
The Swiss company Cormo has been producing a peat replacement at its production site in the French Alsace for a number of years. This product may ultimately be a po- tentially replacement for casing soil used in the mushroom industry. At the end of 2021, this development attracted the interest of German mushroom growers united in the Association of German Mushroom Growers (BDC).
S
everal major, renowned German pro- ducers, in collaboration with Legro casing soil and Cormo, launched a lar- ge-scale trial to validate the results of
using a mixture of casing soil and the Cormo peat replacement. This decision was taken at the BDC annual meeting in Berlin in October 2021 and the project started in March 2022.
Maize he Cormo portion of the mixture consists of trea- ted maize stems. The processing treatment was described in an article in MB 108 (Sep. 2021). The lower half of the stem of French grain maize is harvested and shredded. This material is then pressed to remove the moisture and nutrients. After a pasteurisation process, the fibrous mate- rial, which closely resembles dried white peat, is transported to Legro and mixed on a mixing line located outside the hall with Legro casing soil. In 2021, mixing ratio was 30% Cormo material and
70% Legro casing. This year, after the trial was restarted, the mixing ratio is 50% Cormo material and 50% Legro casing.
2022 The first BDC trials were performed at four mushroom farms that are among the largest in Germany. A mixture of Cormo material, initially without and later with added minerals, was transported from France to the Legro site in Cuijk and mixed with standard casing soil. Water was added, or not, at loading according to customer specific requirements. Because at the time the Cormo material only underwent a simple hygie- nisation process, with no temperature control and outdoors, small ink cap fungi soon started to appear before and during the first flush at the farms in the trial. This was more of a problem for growers who prefer a heavy, wet casing than for the growers that use a drier, finer casing. The quality of the spawned compost also appeared to play a role, and growers who had to fill a slightly weaker compost, with heavy casing soil, seemed to have the most ink cap fungi. Partly due to the lower water retention capacity of the mixture, most growers also saw lower production and quality. The biggest problem, however, was that the Cormo mixture was not properly hygienised. To avoid creating more problems for the partici- pating growers, the trial was temporarily sus- pended in late spring 2022.
The mixture of 50% Legro casing earth and 50% Cormo material, made from maize stems. At first glance, it looks like CAC material, but it’s not.
16 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
2023 In the summer of 2022, in consultation with the participating growers, Cormo decided that the only way to continue with the validation trials would be to properly hygienise the material they supplied. To enable this, mobile pasteurisation tunnels were bought from Traymaster. These tunnels, which are actually converted and adap- ted sea containers, had already proven to be effective when Traymaster used them to produce phase II and phase III compost for a customer in
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