CHALLENGES OF EXOTIC MUSHROOM CULTIVATION (7)
this refinement has happened in a tougher consumer and regulatory market than most Europeans or Americans face. For instance, in a Japanese mushroom farm, it is illegal to use any chemicals. There is not one single approved fungicide or pesticide for mushroom farms. You can’t spray substrate blocks. You cannot even spray the floor or walls around the substrate blocks. At most, farms can use ozone, hydrogen peroxide, or chlorine to clean empty rooms. When I take Westerners to tours of large bottle farms, those who are most familiar with mushroom farms are shocked: here are facilities churning out a hundred tons or more of mushrooms a day and the fruiting and harvesting rooms are as clean as a hospital!
Keeping out the foxes The substrate itself, can only contain sawdust and nutritional supplements, or, as is the case of many bottle-cultivated varieties, imported ground corncob. Not only that, but Japa- nese consumers are very finnicky and there is wide consumer awareness of what exactly a good fresh mushroom looks like. With shiitake, this means an unopened cap, no discoloration under the gills (opened shiitake with red splotches or black spots under the gills, as I see in many pictures of Western markets, get thrown away with stem trimmings and unnee- ded pinheads to be mixed with animal feed), consistent coloration and a good shape. Of course, this also comes down to sales practice, as there is no good way to sell quality fresh mushrooms in displays that are near room temperature and non-humidified, especially without proper packaging. This is simply physically impossible. Good shiitake will be half-rot- ten within two days with the kind of open-air supermarket produce setup common in many Western markets. In essence, what filter bags do is allow the flow of CO2, which the mycelia ‘exhales’ no differently from an animal like a pig or chicken, outside of the bag and letting oxygen flow into the bag while not letting in other bacteria or spores that will compete with the mycelia. This is not as much of an issue with real logs, especially so long as the spawn plugs are properly sealed. But sawdust, and more importantly, the nutritional supplements inside of it - which in Japan are largely wheat bran and rice bran to improve both the C:N ratio and also to enrich the substrate with several key minerals including phosphate and potassium - are in essence pure feed. Unlike button mushrooms and their compost, specialty mushrooms simply aren’t growing on a particularly selective substrate and other than oyster varieties, most are quite susceptible to contamination. Having too many contaminant fungi or bacterium in the substrate after sterilization (and this is why true sterilization, not pasteurization, is so impor- tant) interferes with the incubation process and can often spoil blocks on farms with insufficient hygienic measures, bad spawn, bad substrate (usually too rich in nutritional supplements or using non-fresh/improperly stored sawdust), or, more often, some combination of all of these factors. The filter is ‘the gate around the henhouse’; it’s what you use to keep the ‘foxes’ (competitor molds and other microorga-
Shiitake substrate bags at Imperial Garden.
nisms), out of the biome where you’re raising chickens. Some farms are in climates/regions where they have almost no foxes, and so they can get away with smaller or looser gates, while some farms are so overwhelmed with foxes that they need bigger, specialized gates to hold them back. This is just one reason why so many parts of farm practice are very influenced by a farm’s surrounding environment.
Next Time I think it is important to go into what the core principles of the Japanese system are, and I plan on doing so next time. I also want to note, that as time has passed, fewer and fewer elements of the Japanese system are exclusive to, well, Japan. There are suppliers in the specialty mushroom sector who deal in similar growing materials and equipment (including filter bags) around the world, often with their own localizati- ons and adjustments to meet local market needs. I think the Japanese system, however, has been unfairly dismissed based on a haphazard or surface understanding of its workings, and would like to discuss the way the systems are designed and what their strong points and shortcomings are in my next contribution.
50 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
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