Integrated Prevention and Control Measures for Edible Mushroom Cultivation Techniques and Pests and Diseases
Once pests and diseases occur in edible mushrooms, they are often rather difficult to deal with, and the losses have already been caused. Therefore, integrated prevention and control of edible mushroom pests and diseases places greater emphasis on the principle of prevention first, with prevention mattering more than cure, and uses agricultural control measures as much as possible to reduce the use of chemical agents, so as to avoid phytotoxicity to edible mushrooms and causing contamination.
I. Preventive Measures
1. The spawn factory should be far away from warehouses, livestock farms, loading rooms, sterilization pots and inoculation rooms. The building design should be reasonable, and sterilized spawn bags or spawn bottles should be able to enter the inoculation room directly, so as to reduce opportunities for contamination. Inoculation rooms and culture rooms should be cleaned frequently and disinfected, and regular inspections should be carried out. Any contaminated spawn found should be dealt with immediately and must not be discarded carelessly. Spawn leaving the factory must be guaranteed to be free of contamination and free of pests and diseases. When introducing spawn to the cultivation site, care must be taken to prevent the introduction of pests and diseases.
2. Do a good job of sanitation in cultivation rooms and cultivation sites.
Cultivation sites should be far away from warehouses, livestock farms and garbage dumps. Do a good job of environmental sanitation, reduce hiding and breeding places for miscellaneous fungi and pests, reduce opportunities for artificial spread, and minimize the entry of idle and unrelated personnel into cultivation rooms. Doors, windows and ventilation openings of cultivation rooms should be fitted with screen mesh. When cultivating edible mushrooms in air-raid shelters, tunnels and caves, there should be a dark section at the entrance and exit, and lights should be turned off promptly, to prevent pests from flying in and spreading fungal sources.
During open-field cultivation, clear away the residual stumps in the cultivation site and nearby dead branches, fallen leaves, rotten grass, and bricks, stones and tiles. After cleaning up the environment, the site should also be treated with insecticides when necessary; to prevent termites, trap pits or ring-shaped trenches should be dug.
Before cultivating edible mushrooms, the cultivation room should be swept clean, and shelves, walls and floors should be thoroughly disinfected and treated with insecticides. Special attention should be paid to places where pests are likely to hide, such as brick cracks and shelf gaps. For old cultivation rooms with severe disease incidence, fumigation and disinfection should be carried out by using a mixed solution of 80 ml of formalin and 40 g of potassium permanganate per cubic meter of volume for fumigation. During fumigation, the cultivation room must be sealed; after 2 days, open the doors and windows for ventilation for 24 hours before bringing in the spawn bags. Sulfur fumigation may also be used, at a dosage of 5 g per cubic meter, sealed for 48 hours, and materials are brought in 2 days later.
3. Pay attention to the sanitation of raw materials, spawn bags and tools. Raw materials that are prone to mold and deterioration, such as wheat bran, chaff, rice straw and cottonseed hulls, should be properly stored, and toxic substances and raw materials must be strictly prevented from mixing into the culture medium. Waste materials, material blocks and old spawn bags should not be piled near the cultivation room, and must be used only after high-temperature composting. New and old spawn bags in the cultivation room must be stored separately in different rooms, and absolutely must not be mixed together, so as to prevent pests and diseases from old spawn bags from being transferred to new spawn bags. Cultivation tools should also be used separately, and strict sterilization and disinfection should be carried out to prevent inoculation infection and various secondary infections.
4. Strictly control the quality of spawn. For newly isolated spawn, observations should be made from many aspects, and trial cultivation should be carried out to see its economic trait performance. For introduced spawn, selection should be made according to quality standards. During the spawn production process, frequent inspection and selection should be carried out; once contamination is found, it should be eliminated immediately, ensuring the purity of production spawn. Produced spawn should be used promptly to prevent aging, and the number of subcultures should be controlled. During the cultivation process, once miscellaneous fungi are found, injection treatment with drugs such as formaldehyde should be carried out promptly.
5. Remove residual mushrooms promptly and carry out disinfection. After picking mushrooms, thoroughly clean the surface of the substrate, remove and pick out mushroom roots, rotten mushrooms and damaged mushroom buds, and bury them deeply or burn them in a centralized manner; they must not be thrown away at will. For button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) cultivation, the culture medium and casing soil need disinfection treatment; before being placed on the bed frames, disinfect with bleaching powder or formaldehyde, or spray insecticide and then cover with film and seal for 24 hours.
6. Promote mushroom growth and suppress insects and diseases. Different edible mushrooms have different requirements for their growth and development conditions. Scientific management of humidity, moisture, light, pH, nutrition, oxygen and carbon dioxide, etc., should be carried out according to the requirements of each edible mushroom, so that the entire environment is suitable for the growth of edible mushrooms and unfavorable for the reproduction and growth of pathogenic fungi and pests, which is the so-called promoting mushroom growth and suppressing insects and diseases.
7. Sterilization must be thorough. During cultivation, sterilization generally uses high-pressure or
II. Agricultural control measures
1. Water immersion method for pest control: some pests die from lack of oxygen and the separation of protoplasm from the cell membrane when immersed in water. But care must be taken that the cultivation bags are free of contamination and free of mixed-culture blocks; after soaking for 2-3 hours they will not fall apart and the mycelium grows very well. Otherwise, after water immersion the blocks will fall apart, and although the goal of killing pests is achieved, production efficiency will suffer losses. The method of operation is: for bottle cultivation and bag cultivation, water can be poured into the bottles or bags; for block cultivation, the cultivation blocks can be immersed in water and weighted down with a heavy object to prevent them from floating up, soaked for 2-3 hours, and the larvae will die and float up; after soaking, the bottles and bags are drained of water and returned to their original place.
2. Control by using the habits of pests: some pests have special habits, such as fungus gnats, which have the habit of spinning silk; the larvae spin silk and use the silk to cover the mushroom buds, living in groups in the web and causing damage; these pests can be caught by hand. Gall midges have the habit of paedogenesis; a single larva can reproduce 20 larvae from within its body. Gall midges are small in body and afraid of dryness; exposing the infested bags to the sun for 1-2 hours or sprinkling lime powder will dry the insects to death and can reduce the pest population density. In addition, some larvae of Lepidoptera are very large and brightly colored when mature, and are easily found during mushroom picking and management, so they can be caught and killed at any time. Pests that land in bright places should be swatted and killed at any time. Some larvae leave crawling traces; follow the traces to find and catch them.
3. Trapping and killing pests: to trap and kill mites, using local materials, rapeseed cake gives a relatively good effect. Spread several pieces of gauze on the mushroom bed, sprinkle a layer of freshly roasted rapeseed cake on the gauze, and the mites will gather on the gauze; then dip the gauze in thick limewater and the mites will be killed. With several repetitions, the mite-killing effect can reach more than 90%. Where there is no rapeseed or cottonseed cake, fumigating with cotton balls soaked in dichlorvos solution also gives a good mite-killing effect. Place cotton balls dipped in 50% dichlorvos under the mushroom bed at intervals of about 70 cm in a zigzag arrangement, and cover the surface of the mushroom bed compost with wet gauze; soak in limewater and the mites will die. Repeating several times gives an even better effect. For mosquitoes and moths, using black light lamps or energy-saving lamps to trap and kill them also works well. The method is to put 0.1% dichlorvos in a water basin under the lamp; when the pests fall into the basin they are killed. By using the phototaxis of pests, hang sticky insect boards in bright places; the sticky insect boards are coated with 40% polypropylene adhesive, and the effective period can reach 2 months. In addition, special attention should be paid to eliminating overwintering adults.
III. Chemical control measures
In edible mushroom production, the use of chemical agents to control pests and diseases is not advocated. Edible mushrooms are fungi, and edible mushroom diseases are mostly caused by pathogenic fungi. Using pesticides easily causes phytotoxicity in edible mushrooms. The cultivation cycle of edible mushrooms is short; especially when pesticides are used during the fruiting period, pesticide residues very easily remain in the fruiting bodies, and direct consumption is harmful to human health. Therefore, the use of chemical agents should be minimized as much as possible.
Using chemical agents to control insects is an emergency measure, and sometimes spraying is necessary, but before using chemicals all mushrooms must be completely harvested. If sciarid flies or dung flies occur in the mushroom house, spray 500-fold trichlorfon. If gall midges break out heavily, spraying 500-fold phoxim or dimethoate can achieve a certain effect. When springtails cause serious damage, spraying 500-fold dichlorvos has a very good effect, but note that oyster mushrooms are very sensitive to dichlorvos; when the concentration is slightly higher, phytotoxicity may occur. Fumigating mushroom pests with aluminum phosphide: according to many tests, using 3 tablets (9.9 grams) per cubic meter gives very good control effects against sciarid flies, fungus gnats, dung flies, springtails and slugs, but for gall midges 10 tablets (33 grams) per cubic meter are needed for the control effect to be ideal. Aluminum phosphide absorbs moisture from the air and then decomposes, releasing phosphine; this gas has very strong penetration and can kill pests on the surface layer and inside the mushroom blocks, while having no effect on the growth of mycelium and fruiting bodies, and there is no residual toxin in the mushroom bodies. During fumigation, the mushroom house must be sealed, operators should wear gas masks, and the procedure must be followed strictly. After fumigation, the mushroom house must remain sealed for 48 hours, then ventilated for 2-3 hours before anyone may enter, to avoid poisoning.