Straw Grows Mushrooms, Mushroom Residue Fertilizes Fields

Around National Day, it should still be the slack farming season, but at the Nanshe Edible Mushroom Production Cooperative in Langxia Town, Jinshan District, Shanghai, everything is busy: some farmers are crushing cow dung on the stacking yard, some are sprinkling water on piles of straw, and they are spreading river mud dredged from big rivers and small creeks onto the mushroom beds... Xia Jieming, head of the Nanshe Cooperative, told reporters that their cooperative is growing mushrooms on 100,000 sq ft this year and can produce more than 100 tons of mushrooms a year.

When the reporter came to the mushroom beds where the mushroom compost is piled, Xia Jieming said: "Mushroom compost is the material basis for mushroom mycelium and growth. The compost is mainly wet straw, with one layer of straw and one layer of cow dung, plus rapeseed cake, gypsum, urea and so on. Each sq ft of mushroom bed uses about 3.5 kg of straw, which is the main raw material for mushroom production." This veteran mushroom grower clearly has a special fondness for using straw. By this calculation, this mushroom production base grows mushrooms on 100,000 sq ft, and at 3.5 kg of straw per sq ft, it needs 350,000 kg of straw. Now a rice field generally produces about 300 kg of straw per mu, so the Nanshe Cooperative alone would consume the straw from about 1,000 mu.

In recent years, after the rural autumn harvest, straw has become waste, and farmers burning it has affected the environment. But now in Langxia Town, straw has become a source of wealth for farmers. A person in charge in the town told reporters that Langxia Town now has more than 60 mushroom growers, growing mushrooms on 3.03 million sq ft, which not only puts all the straw produced by the town's 18,000 mu of rice to use, but also lets straw from nearby townships fetch a good price in Langxia. In addition, when the mushroom compost is put on the beds, silt is also needed to cover the surface. At the end of September and the beginning of October, in the big and small rivers and creeks of Langxia, dredgers and mud suction pumps were brought out, and the river mud at the bottom was dug out clean, both fertilizing the mushroom beds and cleaning the river channels.

Xia Jieming told reporters: "Generally, after the compost is put on the beds, the shed is sealed for a month, and by the end of October or the beginning of November the mushrooms can be harvested. It is exactly this period now, and we are preparing to pick mushrooms. These mushrooms all undergo on-site pollution-free testing by the municipal agricultural product quality and safety center and become 'fresh seasonal goods' on citizens' dining tables."

Mushroom production not only puts waste materials such as straw and silt to use, but the mushroom residue has also become a high-quality fertilizer for fields. Xia Jieming also said that after the mushroom residue left from harvesting mushrooms is fermented, crops grown with this fertilizer suffer fewer pests and diseases, thus also reducing the amount of chemical fertilizer used. Of the 300 tons of mushroom residue that came out of the sheds after this year's spring mushroom harvest at the Nanshe Cooperative, 100 tons were bought directly by an organic fertilizer factory; 200 tons were hauled away by the thousand-mu asparagus base in Xindai, Zhejiang.

Today, Langxia Town has already formed a new path of clean agriculture: straw and silt grow mushrooms, mushrooms are produced and sold for money, and mushroom residue fertilizes fields. "The farmers work hard all year, and more than 3 million sq ft of mushrooms can produce more than 4,000 tons of mushrooms a year, which can both contribute to enriching citizens' vegetable baskets and increase farmers' income by about 25 million yuan. This is no small increase in income," Xia Jieming said with emotion.