English
Arabic
Bulgarian
Chinese (Simplified)
Croatian
Czech
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Polish
Romanian
Russian
Slovenian
Spanish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Global Agriculture Services (16)
One of the most effective ways to avoid diseases in the mushroom industry is a cook-out at the end (or beginning) of each cycle.
To reduce the chance that some spores of diseases or insects will survive in the growing rooms after the last day of harvest, it is vital to thoroughly cook out the growing rooms. To ensure that all diseases and pests are killed, it is necessary to heat the entire growing area to 70 ° C for 8 to 12 hours using steam. The entire growing area means that the compost also reaches this temperature for 8-12 hours. Why do I say 8 to 12 hours? In highly effective farms the whole room will be on the same temperature (compost, floors, corners) and 8 hours will be enough, in other farms where you are less effective, meaning the entire room will not be at the same temperature, it would be better to extend the cook-out time to 12 hours.
Often, for reasons of cost or time savings, it is decided to shorten the time or keep the temperature lower, which has the risk that virus can survive. However, to be on the safe side, 70 °C for 8-12 hours is the benchmark, especially if there are diseases or pests on your farm. Some farms decide to cook-out on lower temperatures, especially phase 3 compost farms, to just eliminate the spores for bubbles and cobweb and those are eliminated on lower temperatures. With the high energy prices, a very understandable approach. If there is no virus or Trichoderma on the farm it is probably enough to cook-out on only 60 °C.
After the cook-out, the new growing cycle begins, so it is important that from this moment on no traces of mushrooms, germs or insects end up in the growing area. This is often neglected during emptying, which means that the usefulness of the (expensive!!!) cook-out has been for nothing.
Be aware of that, you invest a lot in cook-out.
Some farms in several countries have not the possibility to cook-out because they have no boiler present on the farm. That means your hygiene has to be excellent, but some farms manage that well. I know farms where they have no boiler and keep the infection very well under control. On the other hand, there are farms that don’t trust their first cook-out and decide to cook the rooms out after emptying and cleaning again before they fill the new compost. Empty rooms are easier and more efficient to cook out.
Of course, you need time in your cycle as well to cook-out. Including the warmup and cooldown period you will need around 24 hours to finish a full cycle. Warming up and especially cooling down needs to be done with a slope up and down in temperature to avoid negative affects to your building.
There are different cooking methods used worldwide. Choose what works best for your farm. If you're building a new farm, consider adding a boiler. Regular cookouts can help prevent problems and keep infections low. This is an effective way to maintain cleanliness and bio security on your farm.
Erik de Groot
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
https://www.mushroomsconsultant.com/
All around the world growers can receive phase 3 blocks. Especially in countries where no or just some raw materials to make compost are available, importing phase 3 blocks is than the easiest way to start mushroom farms.
Transport of blocks should always be done with cooling trucks/containers with also enough O2. A lack of oxygen during transport can cause severe damage to the mycelium and I saw arriving trucks full of Phase 3 compost with such a high CO2 that the mycelium in the compost never recovered completely after filling. The temperature during transport is kept on 2 to 5 degrees C to stop the mycelium from growing and generating heat in the blocks. That is a challenge sometimes.
When the compost blocks arrive at the farm, they should be stored in a cool room on 2 degrees C. Also make sure to have fresh air going into the cool room, especially if stored for a longer period. To ensure you always have enough stock, a few weeks of compost must be available as transport can always be delayed and can disturb a consistent growing cycle.
Before filling/casing the compost with a head filler it should be brought up to temperature. When you fill and case the same day you want to heat the compost up before filling, if you case the next day, you have more time to heat the compost up inside the grow room, until the casing day but as sometimes blocks are still frozen you need to get the blocks defrosted to make sure the blocks break open at filling. It is no problem to have frozen blocks, you just need to make sure they go through the filling machine and get mixed in. Depending on the climate at your location you normally get the compost out of the fridge the night before filling to give it the chance to heat up, ideally between 15 and 18 degrees C, so after filling the growing process can start. In extreme high outside temperatures, you can heat the compost up in shadowed places. In cold environments you must find a place to defrost the blocks and fill them into the growing rooms and heat the compost up there.
If you fill without a filling machine and place the blocks directly in the growing room, it is easier to warm them up inside the room. After filling remove the plastic and warm the compost up slowly. Do not go too fast to make sure the compost does not rise too fast, and you are not able to stop it anymore from heating up too much.
The yield and quality with imported phase 3 blocks can be good if managed the right way. Temperature and O2 level are key factors as well as watering. Be careful to overwater at the start when the temperatures are still low but wait for some good activity.
Good luck.
Erik de Groot
Global Agriculture Services
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Not hard to imagine that reduced air flow going into the compost is not good for the quality of the compost. To maintain high-quality compost, it's crucial to keep the pipes under the bunker floor clean and free from blockages. Blocked pipes can lead to water accumulation on the bunker floor as the water will not drain, and create anaerobic conditions, harming the composting process. Set up a routine to clean all the pipes thoroughly every three months. Use a hose to flush out any dirt and debris, ensuring proper airflow throughout the composting process.
Ensuring thorough cleaning of the blocked pipes is crucial, as simply flushing them with water from front to back may not be sufficient. Despite water passing through, dirt can still accumulate inside the pipes. Achieving a satisfactory result involves reaching the end of the pipes with a hose and utilizing back pressure to dislodge any remaining debris. Attached below is a picture showing completely blocked pipes and the dirt extracted from some of them. This visual evidence underscores the necessity of meticulous cleaning to maintain optimal functioning of the composting process.
When pipes get blocked in composting systems, some issues can pop up. You might see wet spots and areas without enough air (anaerobic zones) in the compost. This happens because the airflow needed for composting gets messed
up. When pipes are blocked, air can't move properly, making some parts of the compost lack oxygen. It will also be visible in the pressure on the bunker floor being reduced. All this isn't good for composting and can cause bad smells and slow decomposition.
It's important to be safe when dealing with blocked pipes in composting systems. Wear a good face mask to protect yourself from harmful gases that can build up in blocked pipes over time. Also, make sure to keep the area well-ventilated and follow safety rules to avoid accidents.
Erik de Groot
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
https://www.mushroomsconsultant.com
Lately, several farms have seen some symptoms of virus which means more focus on hygiene is necessary. Hygiene includes all measures aimed at minimizing the risk of disease and pests developing and spreading. The greatest risk of contamination from diseases and pests is at the time of filling and when the harvest starts because from that moment on several people enter the growing rooms, but there are also risks in other parts of the cultivation cycle like during emptying the grow rooms and that got forgotten on many occasions. Much of it is produced by humans and is preventable.
To reduce the chance that a few traces of diseases or insects still survive in the growing rooms after the last harvest day, it is vital to cook out the growing rooms. To ensure that all diseases and pests are killed, it is necessary to heat the entire cultivation room to 70 ° C for 12 hours by means of steam. By entire growing space is meant that the compost also reaches this temperature for 12 hours. Often, out of cost or time savings, it is chosen to shorten the time, or the temperature is kept lower, which has the risk that spores can survive. However, to be sure you kill all spores, 70 °C is the benchmark for 12 hours, especially if there are diseases or pests on your farm.
After cooking out, the new growing cycle starts, so it is important that from this moment on no traces of mushrooms, spores or flies end up in the growing area. This is often neglected during emptying, which means that the usefulness of (costly!!!) cookout has been for nothing. Therefore, when emptying, observe the following rules:
- Make sure that the people who empty the room wear clean clothes and footwear.
- Do not allow unauthorized persons when emptying.
- Always enter the cultivation area to be emptied from the outside, so not from the work corridor.
- If possible, do not pause during emptying, but only when the entire cell is empty, and the large back door is closed.
- Let the people who work at emptying not have breaks in the same area as the harvesters.
- Use only clean and sanitized material.
As soon as the growing room is empty, close the large back door as soon as possible. After this, it is important to start cleaning the growing area, shelving, and all used materials with water as quickly as possible, preferably with high pressure. Replace the spore filters, hang new fly plates to catch the first insects, and the cell is ready to be filled. If necessary, you can still disinfect the cultivation area.
Erik de Groot
Global Agriculture Services
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Picking mushrooms is more than just removing them from the beds. The handling and picking the right mushrooms is vital. Creating space to allow them to grow bigger is not only for yield. A mushroom with enough space has better evaporation and will hold the quality better, longer and will have a better shelf life as well. Handling of mushrooms can affect quality and shelf life.
Mushrooms that grow between the 1st and 2nd break are called tweeners or in between mushrooms. They are very hard mushrooms because they had a lot of water at the end of the breaks but will discolor fast, once picked, because of that water. They are, however, white inside and are therefore extremely suitable to use for slicing. Many farms worldwide are growing tweeners, only to use them for their sliced product. However, if you have a lot of tweeners it can have a negative effect on the quantity of pins in 2nd breaks. You need to control the amount of tweeners that grow out and spread them out nicely over the whole shelf. If some spots have many tweeners together the 2nd break will not be able to develop well, and yield will be lost. On some farms I see harvest managers making some extra yield with tweeners but not realizing enough that that extra yield gets lost in the 2nd breaks, where you normally pick you nicest quality mushrooms.
That doesn’t mean you can’t grow tweeners. Some farms use them to control the quantity of the pins in 2nd breaks. Just by leaving them nicely spread over the beds you can control the amount of 2nd break mushrooms. Clean the beds good after the 1st break, don’t pick for 2 days and on the 3rd, day manage it well controlling the in between break. If you see the 2nd break coming up spontaneously you can leave some more tweeners, if the 2nd break is struggling on some spots, you must open the in between break up and pick some more there. That need to be planned and managed good to get the best benefits out of the total production.
Erik de Groot
Global Agriculture Services
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Checking the CO2 equipment
For optimal climate control, accurate and reliable measurements are of course very important and maintenance to the CO2 box should be standard on every farm.
First thing would be to check the tubes and the magnetic valves for leaks. If valves are leaking they need to be replaced immediately as they will cause mixed air in the tubes.
All the tubes can get condense inside and block the air flow, also causing mixed air going into the CO2 sensor and sending the wrong value to the climate control computer. You can avoid this by blowing the tubes out regularly with an air compressor to avoid condense to gather inside them. Especially when tubes are not placed correctly and have no filter at the end of the tube this will happen easy.
A good practice on every farm would be to check the reference measument value on your CO2 system daily. That value is the CO2 measured in your outside conditions which is either outside, in the central duct or wherever the outside measurements sensors and CO2 tube are placed. The ppm value depends on where it is placed but should be consistent and seeing inconsistent value there can be a first indication that there is something wrong with your CO2 meter and some maintenance is needed. A good portable, calibrated CO2 meter can be a great help and indicator. You can detect problems before any misreading’s will cause more damage than necessary.
When all the tubes are clean and no leaks are detected the CO2 meter needs to be calibrated using a zero cartridge for the low values and CO2 calibrated gas for the higher values. Ask your supplier for the exact instructions.
Erik de Groot
Global Agriculture Services
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
A lot of farms are afraid that water directly on mushrooms will damage the quality but I disagree with that. Of course it depends on the amounts of water you use and the moment of watering, those details are very important but if managed well the water on the mushrooms will give them a smooth cap and some extra weight. What we need to keep in mind is that the moment of watering is very important. Wait for watering on the 1st flush until you see compost activity. If there is no rise in compost temperature wait with water until there is. Normally you see the activity starting on the first picking day when you pick about 0.5 to 1 kg/m2. I always like to water on that first picking day, where the compost just starts to get activity, and let the mushrooms dry naturally, with no force of the fan but with fresh air. What happens is that when you run higher fan speeds after the watering, the fresh air damper will close. You can put a drying program where you lower the CO2 a bit but still the higher fan speed will not increase the amount of fresh air that is needed to dry the mushrooms.
Instead dry the mushrooms naturally and without too much help from the fan speed. Speeding up the fan a lot is not sufficient and is actually working the other way around. When the room is watered the RH is high so the climate system will automatically start drying the room. Leave the fan speed the same so some extra fresh air will come in to do the drying process. Make sure to remove all the access water from the floor directly after watering, if not the process will dry the floor first and the mushrooms will stay wet longer. Make sure you watch your outside conditions to guide this process, with very high humilities you have to use a drying program or consider not too water.
One of the most seen disease in mushroom farms is the dry bubble, caused by the fungus Verticillium fungicola. Its easy to get an infection in the farm and because the disease is very infectious it can spread quickly through the whole farm. Especially in big farms, where many pickers are working, the dry bubble will spread very fast and can cause a lot of damage and be that bad that 3rd breaks may be lost. Pickers should be getting all the information about the dry bubbles so they can detect the infection in an early stage.
A dry bubble in a 2nd break.
Dry bubble is generally caused by spores around the farms in windy, dusty conditions. On filling days when its windy outside with dust in the air its very well possible to get the dry bubbles into the farm. When they are spotted before he 1st break, the infection came in at filling. Once inside it’s a matter of time before the spores are everywhere if not handled well. Hygiene on the farm should be checked and especially have a good look at all the materials that are used for your mushroom waste like stem bins. Spores of bubbles will be present there if not cleaned well and can be spread if materials are getting moved between rooms. Also pickers are a concern for spreading the infection. Spores are sticky so everything that gets touched after touching a bubble can get infected, be aware!!!, it can go rapidly.
Removing the bubbles is off course also very important. When the pickers don’t recognize a bubble and are picking mushrooms while touching dry bubbles it will be always be hard to control the infection rate. Educate them well and spread around as much information as you have to inform pickers about the diastase and the big risk it has on the results of the farm. Let them, or the picking lead, report the infection so a special crew can handle it the right way.
When the pickers recognize the bubbles, the next step is removing the infection as soon as possible. Makes sure when you remove the bubble you don’t spread the spores what will results in more bubbles within 4 to 5 days. Use a wet tissue to cover infected spots too avoid the spread and remove all the spot including the casing soil, using a plastic bag. Close the bag immediately after you have the bubble and surrounded casing soil inside and remove the bag from the farm as soon as possible. You can also leave it in the affected room and remove it after cook-out. After removing it use salt or ammonia to cover the infected area and inspect the area every day to see if the infection is spreading.
It all comes down to a good hygiene, organization and education. Infection can occur suddenly but if threated the right way can also be stopped rapidly. Organize it well so that infections get removed before rooms get picked or watered, those are moments when spores will spread. If everybody recognizes the disease and knows what to do and handles right, bigger problems can be avoided. Hygiene is key, not only for dry bubbles, and should never be underestimated.
Erik de Groot
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
A good climate control is of course vital for every mushroom grower even more if you want to stand out with the quality of the mushrooms. One of the most asked question I get as consultant is: How can we get better quality and how can we keep the quality of the mushrooms good until the end of the flush? Now, of course the quality at the end of the flushes will always be less than at the start, no illusions there. But improvements are always possible and most of that you can get from an ideal climate.
Before we had more advanced climate installations with more options, we always controlled the rooms on Air temperature, Relative humidity and CO2. However, with the new systems coming on the market there is a lot more to learn than we think and controlling rooms, especially in harvest stage, on moisture deficit, inlet moisture control and even measuring systems for evaporation are used.
To understand the difference between all the systems you need to know exactly what the Mollier Diagram stands for and if you manage to run the system well you will see advantages, especially in quality of the mushrooms. The Mollier Diagram is crucial in mushroom growing and climate computers make the changes in the room based on that Diagram with the Absolute humidity (AH) as the biggest factor. Let’s me explain a little bit more about of those controls, the moisture deficit.
As we are changing air temperatures in the flushes you will see in the Mollier Diagram that that will create differences in evaporation as we change the temperature but leave the RH the same, with other words, we change the AH. By controlling on moisture deficit we will maintain a constant evaporation, what will benefit the quality of the mushrooms, no matter what the temperature differences are. The computer will calculate the right RH for the current air temperature, to keep the same evaporation in the growing room.
Moisture deficit is the difference between the current absolute humidity in the room and the maximum possible absolute humidity at the same air temperature. Once this value is constant the evaporation capacity of the air is also constant.
To use this in a practical situation of course first of all you need a climate control computer that supports the moisture deficit system and change it from RH to moisture deficit control, in the computer that will be named as Absolut humidity control. Ideally this is linked with humidity control of the inlet air to get the best benefit. The mushrooms will have a constant evaporation and that will benefit the quality as changes in evaporation will disturb their growth. The mushrooms will get less water stems and go softer in a later stage what would give an extra picking days benefiting the yield as well as quality.
I recommend to change the computer 1 day before you start harvesting the flush from RH control to moisture deficit control. When you changed the control, set the AH in the computer so that the RH is at the same level as you normally run it in the flush. So if you normally run the flush on 17.5 degrees and 89% RH, keep the air temperature the same and set the AH so that he calculates the 89% RH as set point. Keep 0.2 difference between minimum and maximum AH. From that moment forward you let the computer calculate the right RH and change the air temperatures as you normally do, until the end of the flush. After the flush put the system back to RH control.
The only way to find out is try other controls to improve quality. Many option are out there and based on results on other farms worth trying. If you start and are seeing any improvement? Learn more and keep doing trials, good luck.
Erik de Groot
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
