By Roel Dreve TRAINING
The mission of the Mycelia Academy
As well as supplying its own spawn products, Mycelia has offered training and consultancy services for decades. Since 1991, more than 400 students have been initiated into the secrets of substrate and mycelium production. The combined expertise of the entire team has now been transferred to the new Mycelia Academy. We discussed the aims and the background of the academy with the undisputed Mycelia frontwoman, Magda Verfaillie.
B ‘With our training, we
want to prevent students to
make avoidable mistakes and waste precious time and money’
30 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
iologist and mycologist Magda Verfaillie founded Mycelia in 1990 when it was housed in a former meat processing factory in Ghent, Belgium.
In 2008, the company relocated to Nevele, where it was joined later by substrate bag producer SacO2 (both companies are part of Agro Invest Holding - see MB29 and MB75). Boasting 40 years of experience in mycelium production, Magda is known and respected the world over. She has contributed articles to Mushroom Business for more than 20 years. In 2018 Mycelia organised the Wood Fungi conference in Ghent (MB89) and in 2019 Magda was one of the proud winners of the Ambassador of the Mushroom Industry Award. Her son Kasper Moreaux is managing director and co-founder of the Mycelia Academy. He is also chairman of the ESSMI (the European Society for the Specialty Mushroom Industry -seee page 20).
What is the idea behind the Academy? “Our mission is to provide professional training and consultancy on the industrial potential of fungi in all their aspects. We have a course for everybody, also for target groups that were previously unreachable. We give live courses at the production site of Mycelia and SacO2 in Nevele and we provide remote or on-site consul- tancy services. Mycelia Academy has its roots in the School of Mycelia, but it is a completely independent company. We started out in 2021 as a team of five experts in mycelium production training courses. Our aim is to provide the best possible information and share our expertise with companies and individuals, in both live and (in the future) online environments. And with our training, we want to prevent wasting the precious
time and money of our students and customers in their daily practise. We want to remain as objec- tive as possible; we also share information about and with colleagues and competitors, who are, in turn, sometimes customers of SacO2
or Mycelia.”
Who is on the Academy team? “Mycelia Academy was founded by Roel Van de Heyning (director) who is also managing director of SacO2
, Kasper Moreaux from Mycelia, Liese-
lotte Verweider (managing director) and Magda. The last co-founder is consultant Christelle Chevalier, who was R&D and Quality Control manager at the largest spawn manufacturer. In addition to the founders, Jürgen Kynast (Director of Substratproduktion Kynast-Löcke), Jan van Nuffel (Mycelia and SacO2
), Mohammad Al
Shukor, Pascale Vergeyle and Hélène Ntimba (all from Mycelia) are also part of the team.”
There seems to be few public training courses on this subject worldwide? For example in Asia, where there is a wealth of existing knowledge available. “I think many companies able to share this knowledge are unwilling to do so because they want to keep their trade secrets to themselves. We are not afraid to share most of our expertise, after all knowledge always leaks out in some way and shielding knowledge is unnecessary in ano- ther sense. No one who has followed a training course can just go out and start up a spawn lab, in the same way that a mushroom growing course will not fully equip you to operate a successful mushroom farm. In very exceptional circumstan- ces, we have occasionally refused a participant whose main aim was to acquire highly specialised knowledge of our spawn company. But generally
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