200 kgs/week hi-value 

mushroom harvest, on 

CORTES, Bohol, Aug 22 (PIA)—The struggle to meet a demand for 200 kilos of the high-priced grey or gray oyster mushrooms germinate as the Department of Agriculture succeeds in setting up the Bohol United Mushroom Growers Association (BUMGA) and its president setting up a training for production technology adoption this week. 

According to BUMGA President Rona Denque of the Green Thumb Farm in Sambog Corella, the plan is to organize and put up a production support system that would increase local production to cope up with the demand of the high value commercial fungi. 

Denque, who has successfully run a five-year grey, white and pink oyster mushroom as well as milky white mushroom farm in Corella and singlehandedly responded to the rising demand for mushrooms in Cebu said she would be leading a mushroom production training this week with the DA’s Agricultural Promotion Center. 

Earlier, Denque also facilitated a mushroom production orientation at the Island City Mall Activity Center through the DA’s Agricultural Training Institute. 

Among the plans of action, Denque shared, is to capacitate local mushroom farmers into the tedious mushroom culture technology and hope to get them into production to support the demand we are now facing. 

She said there is an upcoming training for 18 farmers who are into or interested in mushroom farming, so they too can produce and raise the town’s aggregate production. 

We are looking at, not the numbers of trainees but the passion and dedication, she said, the two traits the most important investment in mushrooming industry. 

Now with an aggregate production volume of a little over a hundred kilos per week, Bohol’s mushrooms go to high end resorts and restaurants, as well as the cooking tables of the rich and the famous, with the product sought at an expensive P250 a kilo for the white variety, P300 for the gray and P350 for the pink variety. 

Started off as an diversification option after an organic vegetable and fruit farm, organic chicken and ducks, the Green Thumb Farm, Bohol’s leading producer of mushrooms now become a popular learning site for oyster mushroom culture farming to promising farmers who have the passion and dedication needed to grow these cash-promising farm business. 

As the pandemic may have shut down several businesses and presented agricultural farms their needed window of opportunity to step up to the challenge of healthy food production, that has also cemented a plan for oysters to be processed to get to the product even much more value than when it is sold raw. 

Now with diversified products getting Food and Drugs Administration’s nod, Bohol mushrooms from the Denque farm are sold in packs of mushroom chicharon, mushroom yema and pastillas, mushroom chili paste and mushroom tocino from the pink mushroom variety. 

Enthused by the development and a bit challenged by the DA Secretary Dar, DA regional Director Atty Salvador Diputado has accordingly prodded on the budget for the region’s mushroom production which could funnel down to Bohol. 

From almost zero production to over a hundred, and with mushroom production now creating a stir, the government is giving in the support it can, to help in the production of more products. 

Already getting a shared service facility from the government along with their personal investments, Denque said the idea is to engage mushroom farmer adopters in Corella, she said as she leaked a DA plan to declare Corella as the mushroom Capital of Bohol. 

There are mushroom growers in Cebu but they have issues on securing substrate materials unlike Bohol where we have rice fields that give out rice straw, or occasional sawdust, she said. (rahchiu/PIA-7/PIA) 

STEPPING UP INTO THE PLATE. BUMGA President and Bohol’s acclaimed mushroom queen shares the challenge to local mushroom farmers to produce 200 kilos of gray mushroom variety to supply two major high end malls in Cebu. That is not including the local demand from hotels and resorts in Bohol where mushrooms are sold between 250 to P350 a kilo. (rahchiu/PIA-7/Bohol) 

PASTEURIZATION CHAMBER helps the farm make as much fruiting bags by using controlled heat to kill bacteria in the substrate so the fungi could grow unhampered. Denque also makes sure her daughters get to know and learn of the processes as the family dreams of sustaining the farm. (rahchiu/PIA-7/Bohol) 

MUSHROOM PRODUCTS. Mushroom chicharon, mushroom yema, mushroom pastillas, mushroom chili paste and the winning mushroom tocino are among the farm’s mushroom based processed products, which add up to the value of the mushrooms as well as solves the product’s short shelf life. (rahchiu/PIA-7/Bohol)