CHALLENGES OF EXOTIC MUSHROOM CULTIVATION (8) By Jake Waalk, Salai International Japan
Growing sytems for specialty mushrooms (2)
As I made sure to emphasize in last issue, and want to say again in the charged climate that we find ourselves in at the moment, that this two-part article is simply about two different kinds of growing systems that developed in different countries. In many ways the divide is similar to American and Dutch systems with button mushrooms. I also made clear last time, that I simply don’t have personal experience working with Chinese systems, therefore I focused on what I am familiar with. This does not represent a value judgment.
Automatic shelving machine. Triple-decker incubation room.
Japanese perfectionism I do not mean the label Japanese perfectionism in an enti- rely positive manner. Japan frequently values the perfect over the efficient, and Japanese farmers and businesspeo- ple have a famously low tolerance for risk and instability. The common Japanese systems for shiitake, with larger 2.5~2.7-kilogram square blocks, comprising around 80~85% deciduous sawdust by dry weight (nearly always oak varieties in Japan), sterilized at 118 degrees, then top-spawned using sawdust-spawn, and incubated in a two-stage incubation that lasts between 100~110 days, work very well. Japan has designed this system so that you get nearly the exact yield for every single block, producing with enormous consistency and minimizing the number of contaminated and failed blocks to the point where they are nearly negligi- ble as a business expense. The system is also designed around a regulatory framework that does not allow any form of pesticide or fungicide to be used around mushrooms. As I have listed before, in Japan, farmers can use ozone, bleach, water, and hydrogen peroxide to clean rooms and shelves, but that’s it. Japan’s food safety regulations are strict and well-enforced. The ideal for the Japanese system is to be able to harvest 500~600 grams per block on the first harvest for every block produced. Each batch, when you average out the yield of all blocks in the batch, should fall in that range, even looking over two to three years. Japanese farmers require and desire this kind of enormous stability in their expected yields and they get it. Japanese farms run on tight contracts for which there are penalties and permanently lost busi- ness for any failures to meet, so a farm manager needs to be able to calculate that, say, 30 days later fruiting room A opens up (space is the constraining factor on most farms in Japan), and that room hold 1600 blocks. They need to be able to calculate, with certainty, that room A then produces
48 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
