Mushroom, as a high-protein food, is growing into a big business in India every passing year. As a mushroom lover, you would probably know that it is a fungus. But the best part is that it is highly nutritious. Today’s consumers have realized its value and are incorporating this item into their diets. It is no more a food item for the classy or the rich. You can find it sold at any local sabzi mandi (vegetable market) or among the many vegetables sold by the push-cart vegetable vendors.
A few years back, I remember how the name mushroom would give my mother chills. She had heard stories about people dying after consuming mushrooms in some nearby villages of her locality in Assam. Mushroom was a big no-no at our home. No doubt, it’s true that people die due to mushroom consumption, but that is when they consume the poisonous variety, most of the time growing in the wild. The humid climate of Assam is perfectly suitable for mushroom growth. During monsoons, kathphula (mushrooms) are a common sight in the house yards in Assam. Even today, we hear at least one story in the news, every year, about how people died consuming poisonous mushrooms.
But this is not something that we shall be discussing here. Let’s forget about the bad part! It’s all about caution in sorting edible mushrooms from inedible ones. What we shall discuss is the opportunity that mushroom farming has provided to village farmers, especially women farmers, who have benefitted from mushroom cultivation. Many first-time agripreneurs have become highly successful with commercial mushroom cultivation ventures.
Let’s discuss a few success stories in mushroom-preneurship.
So it was a chance incident for award-winning mushroom farmer Rajkumari Binita Devi from Manipur. Today, she earns more than 12 lakhs per annum through mushroom production. Her journey from being a housewife to an agripreneur began after an incident. Some young boys had started mushroom cultivation near where she lived. But they were asked to leave the area by the landowner. They left but left behind the farming materials at her house. She asked them later to take those away. It is these boys who taught her the technique of mushroom farming. She started farming in a few polybags at first and later shifted to a small room in her house in 2011. However, initially, she faced problems due to the rotting of the mushrooms. She undertook training in 2016 and resumed her plantation. This training changed her business into a successful venture. She started getting a good number of customers for her yield. With a small loan, she expanded her production. One polybag would yield up to two kg of mushrooms depending upon the season. She sold her mushrooms through local vendors and other outlets. She also started receiving customers from Delhi. At wholesale, her mushrooms were priced Rs. 160 a kilo. Today she produces mushrooms in around 3000 polybags that help her generate an average income of one lakh a month. She has also expanded her product line with value-added items such as mushroom pickles, dry mushroom, mushroom tea, mushroom cookies, etc. and this is giving her more income. Her USP is local Manipuri flavor to the value-added products. She believes that customers’ sensitiveness towards health and nutrition is the main factor for the growth of her mushroom business.
Vimla Gupta from Udhampur, J & K, is another epitome of a successful woman mushroom entrepreneur. It is not that she wanted to become an entrepreneur. But it was destiny’s call that awaited her at an exhibition in her town in 2007. An employee from the agriculture dept. at the exhibition managed to persuade her to start growing mushrooms. She, at that time, ran a private school that she was about to shut down as she did not have a proper income from that job. The person she met at the exhibition convinced her to use the school premises instead. She thus started growing button mushrooms by manually preparing the required vermicompost for cultivation.
Once she earned suitable money from her first crop, she doubled the resources for doubling the production. She worked on building her market networks for selling the produce. Vimla’s son also joined the business. Today they have an average output of more than 1000 oyster mushroom bags and 500 bags of button mushrooms annually. They plan to add other varieties of mushrooms too.
They diversified into value-added products like mushroom pickles which are in great demand. They sold around 1.5 quintals of a pickle as of now. According to Vimala, any agri-business is a great business to start with. The Government has also been very actively promoting agri-entrepreneurship in their area. Many others have also joined in and have increased their incomes through mushrooming.
Heard about the small-scale mushroom business that helps earn 40K a day! It’s true. A mother-son duo from Ernakulum in Kerala has made it happen. Leena and Jithu are making it big in this sector in just a few years. It started as a pastime activity for Jithu Thomas and his mother to sow mushroom seeds and reap the crop. And it has turned into a 5000 square feet farm space and lab area now where they produce around 100 kg of mushrooms every day. A packet of 200 gm is priced at Rs. 80. It is a highly profit-yielding crop.
Leena’s Mushroom Farm, as the name of their business goes by, employs scientific methods to grow mushrooms. They have installed proper cooling systems to manage temperature, extremely crucial for mushroom growth. Initially, mushroom farming was a side business, but once they realized the potential of this powerful fungus and its high demand in a health-conscious marketplace, Jithu became a full-time mushroom farmer. They have around 11 women staff. Like other entrepreneurs that we talked about above, they distribute their produce among local vegetable shops. They also sell it to supermarkets in their area. As per them, the advantage of mushroom farming is that, unlike other crops, the waiting period for the harvest is very short. However, they believe that the crop is fragile and sensitive and hence needs extreme care.
Mushroom is going to become a superfood in India and the early comers in this business, who knows, might become the super-entrepreneurs soon. So if you are thinking of what business to start with, just try your hands at mushroompreneurship! You probably may have a golden chance to be successful in a sector that is soon to become a 20.8-million-ton market. Best luck mushrooming.
Source:
https://www.ifp.co.in/ifp-breaking-point/the-success-story-of-a-woman-mushroom-farmer-in-manipur
https://yespunjab.com/in-udhampur-one-womans-success-story-in-mushroom-cultivation-inspires-others-to-follow-suit/
https://www.thebetterindia.com/282454/mother-son-duo-leenas-how-to-grow-mushroom-farm-earnings-success/?fbclid=IwAR12PfjOK9DVuArB1_mjs9Yd6P_NEnOoeWFEheA7HI-VCzrEZnPfPcQ_aAg
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mushroom entrepreneurs