HARVEST
The manager also inspects the upper beds.
Recognising diseases and taking the correct action is crucial.
For the best results, one picking assistant should be assigned to approximately 20 pickers. This assistant inspects them and helps with practical things like supplying empty packing and removing full packaging.
When picking has come to an end in the growing room, it's important that the assistant checks all the beds for the condition and quality of the mushrooms, before signing off the pickers so they can leave. To transfer more picking skills and improve picking in practice, highlighting one improvement point each week can be a positive motivation. For example, stalk length. You can give the pickers additional information on this subject and the manger and assistants will monitor attention to stalk length more during that week.
When there are a lot of pickers in the same room, organising
picking gets difficult.
Mistake 4: Too many pickers in the growing room
The number of pickers per growing room depends on the size of the room, the cap diameter being picked, how many kilograms of mushrooms are picked per m2
and the average
picking speed. For example, the cap diameter is 50 mm on average, the weight in kilograms is 5 kg/m2
hour. The growing room measures 320 m2
and the picking performance is 28.5 kg/ with
two rows of shelves. A total of 1600 kg of mushrooms must be picked in this growing room. One picker picks seven hours/ day x 28.5 kg/hour = 20 kg/day. So eight pickers are needed in this room and each picker picks 40 m2 per day.
bed
If the mushrooms grow faster, or daily produc- tion has not been estimated accurately and 1.4 kg/m2
10 MUSHROOM BUSINESS more is picked, harvesting this room can
still be accomplished if these eight pickers work nine hours on that day instead of seven. Even if the picking performance drops to, for example, 22.5 kg/m2
because more fine grade mushrooms
have to be harvested than expected, the same eight pickers working two extra hours will finish the task. The advantage of harvesting longer in a growing room is better production and quality, and as the pickers harvest slightly larger mushrooms on average, their picking perfor- mance increases. When there are a lot of pickers in the same room, organising picking is more difficult. The pickers will get in each other's way, resulting in less efficient work. Graze picking with too many pickers in the same room is also complicated and therefore not advisable.
Mistake 5: Failure to detect diseases in time
On average, pickers today tend to switch employers more regularly, work for a shorter period of time, and there is a higher staff tur- nover. All these (new) pickers have to learn how to recognise diseases and take the right action. Both issues- recognition and correct action- nearly always leave a lot to be desired. Any out- breaks of bubble or cobweb disease on the farm spread like wildfire across the beds and between the growing rooms. It's vital to have good pos- ters showing what the symptoms and the disea- ses look like, and what actions a picker should take if an infection is noticed. It does not have to be complicated: consistently repeat and super- vise, give proper instructions, make agreements and make everyone aware of possible conse- quences if agreements are not kept to.
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
