CONTENTS 30 ESSMI DAY AUSTRIA
Roel Dreve Publisher Global Roel Media
Have your cake and eat it
26 HAVENS AT 180
10 20 30 38 46
At the 77th 10 AT THE BDC BDC Jahrestagung in Leipzig
The new wind of expansion at CNC ESSMI Day(s) 2025 in Austria
Current (alternative) applications of mycelium Bart de Leeuw retiring
EN: 23 News 7, 18 Cultivation tips AdVisie 26 FOCUS 44 Cultivation tip John Peeters 48 Cultivation tip Mushroom Office 50 Service
Frontpage photo: 3D printed mycelium (and sawdust and seaweed) wall - ‘Growing Façade’ - by Eric Klarenbeek. The façade is made of unique, fully biobased and regenerative 60x60 cm panels. On display at Kazerne during Dutch Design Week 2025 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The first wall has been acquired by company Heijmans. See page 38.
Small illustration: During the ESSMI Day 2025 in Vienna, two farms were visited that, pretty special for Europe, grow specialty mushrooms on bottles. See page 30.
Recently I saw a social media post from a mushroom grower in the USA, who was looking to hire 30 (!) new employees. A scarcity of labour is an on-going challenge for mushroom producers worldwide. In many countries, mushroom growing remains labour-intensive. This is especially true in regions with limited investments in robotisation and automation due to a lack of funding, or because locally available labour is cheap. In situations where local workers are scarce, either because the workforce prefers office jobs or wages for the locals are simply too low, mushroom growers source their employees from elsewhere. In India, for example, I saw how seasonal growers close to Delhi hire their pickers in the poorer eastern regions of the country. In Western Europe too, cheap labour from more eastern regions was, and still is, recruited to fill the shortages, and not always housed in good conditions. In a similar way, the USA has structurally employed poor migrants from neighbouring southern countries for many years. The Dutch economy, where hundreds of thousands of (also highly skilled) migrant labourers work and live, would probably collapse completely without them. This influx of ‘foreigners’ does not usually lead to problems, but populist and/or racist political parties frequently magnify these (often cultural) challenges and make all migrants a scapegoat for broader issues of what is, or seems, wrong in society. So people who oppose immigrants in their country (such as pro-Brexit voters) should not be surprised if the strawberry or mushroom harvest remains unpicked if cheap labour is expelled. Now I don’t know why the aforementioned grower is looking for 30 employees, maybe he’s just expanding his business. But in the USA, immigrants, illegal or not, are now literally being hunted down - which can have drastic consequences for communities, the labour market, and for growers. American trade association AMI is working extremely hard to limit the negative effects, but many agricultural Trump supporters in the USA with a labour-intensive structure could now be regretting their choice at the polling station in 2024. And not just for that reason. Duh.
MUSHROOM BUSINESS 5
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