The potential of BIOSCHAMP with Organic Mushrooms

Organic production has generally highly demanded technology, and mushroom cultivation has an additional specificity. Namely, in the organic production of the A.bisporus, a specific challenge arise from the fact that only old-fashioned compost made by the processing of horse manure, can be considered. Second and not less important is the casing, which often generates serious problems in growing units, and in organic certified production, it is an even more serious problem. On one hand, the casing must fulfil the regular demands of the mushrooms (high water capacity, adequate MO flora...) and on the other hand, must provide pure and clean material that meets the high organic production standard and eliminates the disease pressures, as much as it is possible.

As a consequence of such demanding technological requests and rules, organic A.bisporus production is relatively rare. Ekofungi is one of those, where the circular model of A.bisporus production according to the regulation of organic production is applied. Production is realized in the tunnels with capacities of 18t of the Phase 2 compost.

Taking into consideration that compost production in Ekofungi is not uniform, the experimental design in BIOSCHAMP project is created with the aim the testing all 3 varieties of the casing delivered by project partner Kekkilä-BVB and NEWFOSS, in one growing unit. Thanks to such an experimental design, all 3 sorts of the tested casing were subjected to the same conditions of watering, temperature regime, CO₂ manipulation etc. This specificity, compared with other validation models, provides significant relevance to the BIOSCHAMP results.

During the validation period, Ekofungi completed several growing cycles and came up with very interesting results. The innovative casing varieties produced provided great results in the growing units where organic mushroom production is performed.