The author is Adam Vaughan.
Mushroom farms create fruiting bodies by using a layer of peat.
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In a huge industrial shed on Leckford Estate, a farm owned by the supermarket Waitrose, a revolution is taking place in the world of mushroom growing. Peatland has a lot of carbon. The UK government wants to help meet its climate change goals by restoring 280,000 hectares of peatland.
Around 60 years ago, growers in the UK realized that growing mushrooms in peat was better for their yield. Most button mushrooms are grown on composted straw and animal waste, but to actually harvest and eat the fruit of the mushroom, you need a layer on top of the composted straw and animal waste. That is what the liquid is made of. It holds a lot of water and is ideal for fruiting bodies.
The majority of mushrooms in the UK are grown this way. According to Noble, the UK uses roughly a ninth of the UK's annual harvests for this purpose. It is a significant use of the substance. Pete Smith at the University of Aberdeen in the UK made assumptions about the density of the material in order to estimate the amount of carbon dioxide that would be released. He says that growing mushrooms in the UK is equivalent to the emissions of more than 2500 cars.
The challenge is to find a material that gives the same yield and quality. A £108,000 government funded research project is being led by his company. Coir comes from coconut husks. The options being looked at are powdered bark and compost. A research team led by Jan van der Wolf at Wageningen University and Research found that grass fibres made with a patented process could be used.
Van der Wolf and his team were able to grow mushrooms in the grass and they looked just like those grown in peat. At Leckford Estate, the staff say they have successfully used coir in small tests to create mushrooms, and this week they are in the process of putting it down across a whole bed to produce whole mushrooms. They don't know if growing coir will mean less mushrooms in the same shed. Noble won't be revealing the official results of the project until next year at the earliest, as he says they won't be published until next year at the earliest
As part of its efforts to phase out peat, the National Trust is looking for a supplier that can grow mushrooms without it. It hasn't been able to find one that can do it at the scale required. The trust decided to reduce the use of mushrooms at its cafes.
The National Trust has experience with scale. It is not clear if there is enough coconut husks to fill that hole. The Leckford Estate staff thinks there's enough coir to go around. Peat is good at retaining water, but compost and coir won't hold as much. Noble says that most of the water in mushrooms comes from the material used to make them. One of the stumbling blocks is that peat doesn't vary very much, so alternatives will need to mimic that uniformity to keep mushroom yields up
The staff at Leckford Estate don't think that's true, they're trying to shift the farm's methods to reduce its environmental impact Regulation is on the way. If adopted, the UK government's proposal to phase out the use of peat in commercial horticulture by 2028 will mean an end to the growth of mushrooms. There is still a decision to be made. Mushroom production gets shifted to other countries that are less concerned about the environment, which is why developing alternatives is important. Peat can be used as a growing medium, but it isn't sustainable. He says there is a lot of pressure on the land. Those researching alternatives are saluted by Smith. Peatland is too precious to be used for gardening.
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