Partner Spotlight: visit Fargreen’s Mushroom Research & Training Home
By Nhi Doan
Earlier this month, the Fargreen team paid a visit to our valued partner - the Mushroom Research Center at the Vietnam National University of Agriculture in Hanoi - and learnt a ton about their innovative work of conserving and developing mushroom cultivars!
As the only organization in Vietnam that conducts rigorous research on local edible and medicinal fungi, the Mushroom Research Center is where Fargreen sources the highest quality spores for our mushroom cultivation. Despite the ebb and flow of the food and agriculture sector during the past year, the Research Center seems to be faring well with its mushroom cultivation courses open to local farm and business owners and a plan to open a brand-new Institute of Mushroom Research in the coming months.
We spoke with Dr. Nghien Ngo, Director of the Biotechnology Center, on the institution’s mission, how it came to partner with Fargreen, and its role in Fargreen’s mushroom cultivation procedure. Here’s a brief recap.
🍄 #1 What exactly is Mushroom Research Center?
Established in 2014, the Mushroom Research Center at the Vietnam National University of Agriculture is an incubator of research and development on all things mushroom (read: Mycology), with a focus on edible and medicinal cultivars.
Its activities include…
· collecting and conserving the genetic resources of 20+ edible and medicinal mushroom cultivars native to Vietnam
· selecting, experimenting with and evaluating the cultivars, in order to optimize their quality and productivity
· supplying local farms and businesses with native mushroom genetic resources, in order to reduce their reliance on imported sources
· conducting technology transfer to local farms and businesses
· collaborating with researchers from all over the world, including those from Russia, China, Japan and the Netherlands
🍄 #2 How did the Mushroom Research Center become a partner of Fargreen?
In 2015, Fargreen was a young startup dipping its toe into the mushroom industry in Vietnam. Determined to learn how to cultivate mushrooms in an organic, waste-free way, the core team took a course at the Mushroom Research Center.
This event opened up a myriad of exciting opportunities. Dr. Ngo soon became our advisor, and together we made a deal: the Mushroom Research Center would not only supply Fargreen with premium mushroom spores, but also train our network of farmers on scientifically based mushroom cultivation practices.
While several years have passed since the Fargreen team graduated from the course, we continue to receive technical assistance regarding mushroom farming from the Center to this day.
🍄 #3 What role does the Mushroom Research Center play in Fargreen’s production process?
To put it simply, the Research Center supplies us with prepared mushroom spores which, upon being taken to Fargreen’s production facilities, are inoculated into pasteurized straw substrate and incubated until they are ready to fruit.
Before the mushroom spores are delivered to Fargreen, they must undergo a painstaking process of experimentation and evaluation, in order to select the most stable and resilient cultivars for large-scale production. During our visit, Dr. Ngo took us to different functional rooms, each hosting samples of mushrooms at their various stages: from spawning and inoculation to incubation and fruiting. We listened with curiosity as he demonstrated the methods of evaluation at each stage, as well as explained the attributes that differentiated one mushroom cultivar from another.
The Center’s rigorous evaluation procedure has consistently produced the excellent mushrooms of Fargreen that people know and love. As we move forward into what’s possibly one of the hottest summers on record, we hope that the work of the scientists at the Mushroom Research Center will stay as vibrant as the sun, and we cannot wait for another productive harvest.
Some photos on the visit day at the facility © Fargreen
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