By Jos Hilkens, AdVisie ‘the mushroom growing consultants’, Herkenbosch |
hilkens@mushroomconsulting.nl HARVEST
TOP 5 mistakes made at harvest
The harvest remains a critical moment on every farm. The larger a farm is, the more difficult it is to get everything right in practice. This article lists the five most common, recurring mistakes revealed by scans of the harvesting process on mushroom farms.
H
Staff turnover is higher than ever and the share of pickers with limited
experience is rising as well.
8 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
arvesting costs account for about 40% of the cost price of the mushrooms (in the Netherlands). Picking the right mushrooms, at
the right time, has a major impact on the final yield and quality and therefore on the financial performance of the farm. Growers are currently being forced to consider how they intend to organise mushroom picking in the future. Staff turnover is higher than ever before and the share of pickers with very limited experience is continuing to rise. This makes investment in solid training, good instruction and supervision a necessity and not a luxury. An evaluation of the organisation, the pickers, the mushrooms and analysis of harvesting data can reveal the bottlenecks. The results are discussed with the harvest manager resulting in a tailor-made pre- sentation for the pickers, practical instructions in the growing room and tips on how to optimise picking practice. And the following five mistakes are sure to be addressed.
Mistake 1: Not thinning enough
Unfortunately for us, mushrooms still do not emerge on the beds in nice neat lines, at stan- dard intervals. That would be the ideal scenario, as we would always have precisely the right number of mushrooms per square metre on the beds. In practice, there are often differences between beds in the same growing room, bet- ween sections of the same bed, between the sides and centre of a bed and patches of 5 to 10 cm diameter where the mushrooms emerge atypically. So a 100% optimal pattern of mushrooms in a growing room just doesn't exist. There are always places with too many or
too few mushrooms, bunches or clusters of mushrooms, mushrooms too deep in the casing, and so on. It’s the task of the manager and the pickers to thin the bed optimally in the first two days of harvest to create sufficient space for air movement between the mushroom. If, at the start, the mushrooms form a close cluster of more than seven mushrooms, waste products will accumulate between the mushrooms and they will ripen earlier. Smaller mushrooms, which are partly under the other mushrooms, will start to ripen too soon if they are too close to the other mushrooms. Elongated stalks and soft caps start to show at an early stage. They will not grow to a diameter of 50 - 60 mm but the cap will open sooner, they will start to dis- colour and have a low weight per piece. Produc- tion in kilograms falls, but the percentage of processing mushrooms will also rise. A picker who invests time in the necessary, optimal thinning in the first two days, will be doubly rewarded later by firmer, heavier mushrooms that boost the picking performance.
Mistake 2: Harvesting once a day
Graze picking the same bed between two and five times a day on peak days at harvest offers many advantages for production and quality. The art is in making pickers understand the positive effect of graze picking, both for the farm and the picker. By harvesting mushrooms of approximately the same size you don't have to grade the mushrooms and can use one type of packaging. The big advantage is that all the punnets or trays hold mushrooms with a similar cap diameter. No extra effort is involved, in fact picking is even easier, and the presentation is
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