Miguel Braganza
Mushrooms are a delicacy that the people all over the world enjoy. They are not animals or plants but a set of fungi that produce edible fruiting bodies that are tasty to eat. Not all mushrooms are edible and some are outright poisonous. Some mushrooms are spooky and glow at night like the Jack-O-Lantern near a cemetery from Halloween to the eve of the All Souls’ Day. Some persons are familiar with ‘Magic Mushrooms’ which can do in the moonlight what the sunburn does in the daytime. This winter we may have both sunburns and mushrooms; and I am not hallucinating about either!
The people of the Konkan region, especially at the foothills of the Sahyadri range of the Western Ghats are blessed by Devi Sateri and Shree Rawalnath with the Termitomyces mushrooms produced in the abandoned ‘Fungal Garden’ created by rawlu or termites in the Sater or Roenn, the termitarium or anthill that is worshipped as the Nirakar or formless earth goddess, Sateri. Decades of research in the Termitomyces species has yielded mushrooms but not a protocol to produce them commercially. These mushrooms are still a gift of Sateri and nature during the month of Shravan and a little of Bhadrapada, August-September in the Gregorian and Julian calendars.
How about eating mushrooms at Christmas, New Year or Easter? One can freeze and store the Termitomyces mushrooms, especially now that ‘blast freezing’ to minus forty degrees Celsius is possible, and so it is stored at that temperature. The easier option is to cultivate other species of mushrooms. Some people were familiar with the European or button mushrooms, Agaricus bisporus that were initially available only in five-star resorts. For the common man, Nelson Figueiredo and I introduced oyster mushrooms, Pleurotus sajor caju. Vicente Souza was the first entrepreneur to set up a spawn production unit at his ‘Lulu’s Farm’ opposite St Michael’s Church, Anjuna in 1986. He produced spawn for his cultivation unit and marketed mushrooms to the foreign tourists in the Anjuna-Vagator-Morjim belt.
In the 1990s, the National Horticulture Board, Gurgaon, created a programme for popularising mushroom production. I was able to move the director of agriculture to permit the setting up of a mushroom spawn production unit at Ela Farm, Old Goa. We set up the laminar flow inoculation chamber and the autoclave in the financial year 1994-95. It has since been upgraded. Simultaneously, Sangam Anand Kurade set up a large button mushroom production unit at Bhuipal-Canacona on the National Highway. He has increased its capacity manifold and now set up another unit in Usgao. ‘Dr Kurade’s’ is now a recognised brand in India producing in tens of tonnes per day.
On All Saints’ Day the Agricos Alumni Association, Goa presented a webinar on oyster mushrooms. Maxswinne Rebelo, Jwen Gracias and others are already growing them commercially in Goa. On November 22, it will host Anant Narayanan who will present about the milky white mushrooms, Calocybe indica that he is cultivating in Goa and which has a great potential in our climatic conditions. It looks and tastes similar to our familiar mushrooms. And now, we can expect mushroom cultivation in Goa to start mushrooming!
