RWANDA
Filling of the pasteurisation tunnel.
is pressed into elongated, sausage-shaped plas- tic bags, stacked in old oil drums, and then pas- teurised at 80°C for five hours. After this heat treatment under atmospheric pressure, the sub- strate is free from weed fungi, but not from bac- teria. Bacteria growth is limited on the nutrient poor mixture, which is not an issue if the blocks are intended for mushroom production. That would be a different story if the bocks were used as spawn. Together with the mycelium, the bac- teria would multiply and compete for the same nutrients. The traditional spawn offered for sale here until now was not an axenic product, but a mixed culture of mycelium and bacteria. The spawn bags are inoculated in a ‘glove box’, a distant ancestor of the laminar airflow. It is a closed chamber with openings containing large sleeves, or gloves, for the operator’s hands. Pro- viding the cabinet has been properly disinfected, and some basic hygiene regulations are obser- ved, it's possible to produce a more or less usable product.
Singed hands
The substrate used for commercial growing is inoculated in a dusty, baking hot room - with no form of air purification - using a system that certainly raised my eyebrows. I though the
42 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
method was not only dubious, but also quite strange. A large table stood at the centre of the room, with two Bunsen burners in the middle and a few plastic bottles of alcohol. Around the table were about a dozen inoculators, wearing clean white lab coats, mouth masks and with covered heads. I was amazed to see how they regularly disinfected their hands by pouring alcohol over them and then singeing them over the hot flame. The bags with traditional spawn are placed open on the table while the sub- strates are placed on the inoculators’ laps. The string closing each substrate bag is loosened, a small quantity of spawn is spooned in and the bag is closed again with a piece of non-sterile cotton wool stuffed into the opening. Such an unhygienic method logically has a disastrous effect on production. First and foremost, losses caused by visibly infected bags are close to 15%. In the remaining bags, mycelium growth is much weaker that customary in Europe. And less well-incubated material will naturally not perform to its full potential. For this reason, Laurent decided to build his own spawn laboratory, so the help of Mycelia was enlisted to ensure the availability of high quality spawn. When I arrived, the spawn laboratory was already in operation, and the first batch of
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