The portable edible mushroom mixing machine has outstanding advantages and is worth vigorously promoting and using.

As of mid-June 2009, Kaihua County in Zhejiang Province had promoted 362 portable edible mushroom mixing machines over 4 years; 2,800 mushroom farmers used the machine, mixing 84 million bags, which greatly eased the labor shortage during edible mushroom production in the county and surrounding cities, counties (districts), saving mushroom farmers 3.1553 million yuan in hired labor costs.

Mixing is the first step in bagged edible mushroom production; it must neither delay bagging time nor be done too early, otherwise the mixing and bagging time can become too long and cause the substrate to sour. Promoting the use of the portable edible mushroom mixing machine solved the practical problems affecting edible mushroom yields in Kaihua County, such as labor shortage, high labor intensity and poor mixing quality. Scientific and technical personnel at the county agricultural science institute once made a comparison: to produce 4,500 bags of enoki mushrooms at the same time, manual mixing required 4 laborers mixing 8 times and took 28 hours to complete; while the mixing machine needed only 2 laborers and 6 hours to complete. To produce 30,000 bags of substrate, manual mixing required 1,470 yuan in labor costs; while using the mixing machine cost only 49 yuan, saving 1,127 yuan in hired labor costs.