ESTONIA
Jürgen and Mitch listening to Tanel Heinsalu, hericium erinaceus fruiting on the left.
Siim and Jan in a container with Chinese shiitake substrates.
water tank from the Soviet era. It is the size of a church and is now used as a substrate production facility. He uses local waste streams, such as wood chips and oat bran, which he turns into cylindrical-shaped substrate blocks using a sim- ple Chinese made machine. They have a hole in the middle and weigh an estimated 2 kg. In the same room, Tanel has several rustic-style metal vats in which he pasteurises the substrates for eight hours at 90°C. After spawning them in his homemade laminar air flow system, he moves them to one of the sea containers to enable their continued growth. These sea containers are connected to his production area. Despite the limitations of his infrastructure, he loses only 5% of the substrates to infections. In some of the sea containers, Tanel has installed a vertical shelving system with sections where the substrate fructi- fies horizontally, through ultrasonic humidifica- tion. The family makes a successful living from mushroom growing, thanks to high yields of pleurotus ostreatus, pleurotus eryngii and heri- cium erinaceus on the low cost blocks. They sup- ply mainly to supermarkets, while the remainder of the harvest is dried for processing into myco- ceuticals. Last but not least, Tanel and his wife
receive about a thousand visitors each year, all curious to come and listen to the family’s story, and to take home a portion of exotic mushrooms.
Scandic Organic Now back to the Chaga group, which has very ambitious plans regarding the production of sterilised substrate for lignicolous mushrooms. The management envisages new opportunities in this area, as Europe needs an affordable alterna- tive to imported substrate from China. For a while, the Chaga group conducted cultivation trials in containers at its headquarters in Tallinn, mainly on shiitake blocks from China, and to a lesser extent on other exotics grown on home- made substrate. Based on the results, they deci- ded to launch large scale substrate production, which will be entrusted to a new subsidiary company, Scandic Organic. Production manager Siim Raadik gave us a tour of the vast premises, which are located in Törva, near to the Estonia- Latvia border. At the time of our visit, all the Chinese made equipment, including a two-door autoclave with steam boiler, was ready to be installed. The industry must continue to innovate and advance: the plan is to promote the sub- strates internationally at the Mushroom Days in May. Three sterilisation cycles per day in a 10 m³ autoclave should yield an initial output of 80 tons of marketable substrate a week, most of which is intended for sale in the rest of the EU. We are eagerly awaiting the results of the first production batches.
Maidu (right), Jürgen and Magda, happy to have found starting conks in the wintry woods. 28 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
A walk with Maidu in a wintry Chaga forest was the final stop on the tour. After some searching, we found some trees which were inoculated with plugs and showing the first signs of conk formation. Unfortunately, conks grow so slowly that it can take up to ten years for them to be harvest ready. So while waiting that long was obviously out of the question, it brought the day to a perfect close.
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