The Importance of Spiritual Ecology in the Qingyuan Forest Mushroom Co-Cultivation System

The ecological value encapsulated in the term “spiritual ecology” is drawing more and more attention from ethnology, folklore, ecology, and other related disciplines. The custom of respecting and pacifying forest spirits has distinct regional and ethnic characteristics, and many scholars have discovered samples from different studies around the world. Qingyuan County, located in the mountainous region of southwest Zhejiang, is a very typical case of the practice of respecting and pacifying forest spirits. The mushroom-cultivation technology invented by the chthonic people there more than 900 years ago made this the global birthplace of artificial mushroom cultivation. The Qingyuan Forest–Mushroom Co-cultivation System (QFMCS) has been listed as an important agricultural heritage system by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China, Beijing, China and a candidate project by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy for Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS). Additionally, the QFMCS is currently an important part of the Baishanzu National Park under construction. The authors made an in-depth field study in the mountainous areas of Qingyuan and used theoretical methods of ecology, anthropology, and folklore to reveal the function spiritual ecology plays in ecological conservation, forest protection, identity, and the maintenance of community interests. In the “traditional-modern” transformation of Qingyuan County, the practice of respecting and pacifying the Spirits is still being propagated, resulting in expansion and social cohesion.

Assessment of Farmers’ Perception about Crop Residue Burning in Haryana

The study was conducted in 2019-2020 to assess the perception of the farmers on cropresidue burning (CRB) in Haryana. A total of 180 farmers from three purposively selecteddistricts, namely Karnal, Kurukshetra, and Fatehabad from Haryana, were chosen to collectdata. Stratified random sampling was employed in the selection of blocks, villages, andrespondents. For measuring farmers’ perception, a scale was constructed using Likert’smethod of summated ratings. Farmers perceived CRB as an economical and viable optionand considered it an efficient practice. Most farmers did not perceive the happy seeder asfeasible since it needed a high horsepower tractor. Farmers’ perception was positively andsignificantly correlated with education, operational land holding, and annual income (P<0.05).Hence, there is a need to promote community-based approaches like custom hiring centre,bio-mass-based power plants, mushroom cultivation, etc., through extension and advisoryservices. It may lead to adopting alternative crop residue management options and mitigatingresidue burning in the long run.

Mushroom Quality Related with Various Substrates’ Bioaccumulation and Translocation of Heavy Metals

Mushrooms are popular due to the nutrition contents in the fruit bodies and are relatively easy to cultivate. Mushrooms from the white-rot fungi group can be cultivated on agricultural biomass such as sawdust, paddy straw, wheat straw, oil palm frond, oil palm empty fruit bunches, oil palm bark, corn silage, corn cobs, banana leaves, coconut husk, pineapple peel, pineapple leaves, cotton stalk, sugarcane bagasse and various other agricultural biomass. Mushrooms are exceptional decomposers that play important roles in the food web to balance the ecosystems. They can uptake various minerals, including essential and non-essential minerals provided by the substrates. However, the agricultural biomass used for mushroom cultivation is sometimes polluted by heavy metals because of the increased anthropogenic activities occurring in line with urbanisation. Due to their role in mycoremediation, the mushrooms also absorb pollutants from the substrates into their fruit bodies. This article reviews the sources of agricultural biomass for mushroom cultivation that could track how the environmental heavy metals are accumulated and translocated into mushroom fruit bodies. This review also discusses the possible health risks from prolonged uptakes of heavy metal-contaminated mushrooms to highlight the importance of early contaminants’ detection for food security.

A study on mushroom management perception of employees in Provincial Directorates of Youth and Sports (Niğde province example)

It seems that the mushroom management metaphor has become a new research area in management sciences. This management style takes its name from mushroom cultivation in terms of method similarity. In mushroom cultivation; mushrooms are left in the dark and only allowed to grow by giving them the resources they need. In the mushroom management metaphor, managers leave employees in a kind of darkness. They provide only the resources they need without conducting mutual communication with them and does not need to share information with the employees. At the end of this process, managers expect an increase in performance from their employees. Within the scope of this study, it was aimed to measure the mushroom management perceptions of 4-a and 4-b employees in Niğde Provincial Directorate of Youth and Sports. The sample of the study consists of 92 civil servants, 42 women and 50 men, working in the Niğde Provincial Directorate of Youth and Sports. Personal information form and the “Mushroom Management Scale” developed by Birioğlu and Tekin (2018) were used as data collection tools. Descriptive statistics were used in the analysis of the data, T-test was used for pairwise comparisons, and ANOVA test was used for more than two comparisons. As a result, according to the findings, it was determined that the employees had a medium level of mushroom management perception. No significant difference was found between the sub-dimensions of administrative duty, gender, age, and tenure. ​Extended English summary is in the end of Full Text PDF (TURKISH) file. Özet Mantar yönetim metaforunun, yönetim bilimlerinde yeni bir araştırma alanı haline geldiği görülmektedir. Bu yönetim tarzı ismini metot benzerliği açısından mantar yetiştiriciliğinden almaktadır. Mantar yetiştiriciliğinde; mantarlar karanlıkta bırakılır ve sadece ihtiyacı olan kaynaklar verilerek yetişmesi sağlanır. Mantar yönetim metaforunda da yöneticiler, çalışanları bir çeşit karanlıkta bırakır; onlarla karşılıklı iletişim yürütmeden sadece onların ihtiyacı olan kaynakları sağlar ve çalışanlarla bilgi paylaşımına gerek duymaz. Bu sürecin sonunda yöneticiler, çalışanlardan performans artışı beklerler. Bu çalışma kapsamında, Niğde Gençlik ve Spor il Müdürlüğünde 4-a ve 4-b çalışan personellerin mantar yönetim algılarının ölçülmesi amaçlamıştır. Çalışmanın örneklemini, Niğde Gençlik ve Spor İl Müdürlüğünde çalışan, 42 kadın, 50 erkek olmak üzere toplam 92 memur oluşturmaktadır. Veri toplama aracı olarak kişisel bilgi formu ve Birincioğlu ve Tekin (2018) tarafından geliştirilen “Mantar Yönetim Ölçeği” kullanılmıştır. Verilerin analizinde tanımlayıcı istatistikler, ikili karşılaştırmalarda T-testi, ikiden fazla karşılaştırmalarda Anova testi uygulanmıştır. Sonuç olarak; elde edilen bulgulara göre çalışanların orta düzeyde mantar yönetim algısına sahip oldukları belirlenmiştir. İdari görev, cinsiyet, yaş ve görev süresi ile alt boyutlar arasında hiçbir anlamlı farklılık tespit edilememiştir.

Influence of Agaricus Bisporus Establishment and Fungicidal Treatments on Casing Soil Metataxonomy During Mushroom Cultivation

The cultivation of edible mushroom is an emerging sector with a potential yet to be discovered. Unlike plants, it is a less developed agriculture where many studies are lacking to optimize the cultivation. Mushrooms are a source of resources still to be revealed, which have applications not only in food, but in many other sectors such as health, industry and biotechnology. Mushroom cultivation consists of the development of selective substrates through composting where the mushroom grows via solid fermentation process. In case of Agaricus bisporus, the compost fully colonized by mycelium hardly produces mushrooms and it is necessary to apply a casing layer with certain physical, chemical and biological characteristics to shift from the vegetative mycelium to the reproductive one, where the native microbiota plays crucial roles. Currently, the industry faces a challenge to substitute the actual peat based casing materials due to the limited natural resources and the impact on the peatlands where peat is extracted.In this work we have employed high-throughput techniques by next generation sequencing to screen the microbial structure of casing soil employed in mushroom cultivation while sequencing V3-V4 of the 16S rRNA gene for bacteria and the ITS2 region of rRNA for fungi in an Illumina MiSeq. In addition, the microbiome dynamics and evolution (bacterial and fungal communities) in peat based casing along the process of incubation of Agaricus bisporus have been studied, while comparing the effect of fungicidal treatment (Chlorothalonil and Metrafenone). Statistically significant changes in populations of bacteria and fungi were observed. Microbial composition differed significantly based on incubation day, changing radically from the original communities to a specific microbial composition adapted to enhance the A. bisporus mycelium growth. Chlorothalonil treatment seems to delay casing colonization by A. bisporus. Proteobacteria and Bacteroidota appeared as the most dominant bacterial phyla. We observed a great change in the structure of the bacteria populations between day 0 and the following days. Fungi populations changed more gradually, A. bisporus displacing the rest of the species as the cultivation cycle progresses. A better understanding of the microbial communities in the casing will hopefully allow us to increase the biological efficiency during production as well as possibly help us to have a clearer view of the microbial community-pathogen relationships as they are directly related to disease development.

Neuro-fuzzy humidity control for white oyster mushroom in a closed plant production system

Oyster mushrooms grow optimally in relative humidity of 80-90%. As a tropical country, Indonesia is very suitable for oyster mushroom cultivation, but relative humidity must be controlled. The usual effort is ineffective by spraying water to mushroom inside kumbung (mushroom cultivation building) every morning and evening. A building called a Closed Plant Production System (CPPS) equipped with a control system needs to be developed as a solution. The purpose of this study was to design and do a performance test of a neuro-fuzzy based relative humidity control system inside CPPS for white oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) cultivation. The main components consist of Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller, SHT11 sensor, and diaphragm pump connects with mist nozzle as an actuator. The performance test was carried out by running neuro-fuzzy based control system and giving disturbance inside CPPS room. As a result, this control system was able to reach a steady-state condition within 5 minutes. The highest relative humidity error was 0.73%, and the lowest error was 0.09%—the recovery rate of relative humidity inside CPPS when disturbed was 2.25% per minute.

Enhanced IoT-Based Climate Control for Oyster Mushroom Cultivation Using Fuzzy Logic Approach and NodeMCU Microcontroller

Urban farming has the potential to utilise unused space in the community to alleviate food shortages and increase the community’s income through local food production. When Internet of Things (IoT) technology is integrated with urban farming, it can further improve its efficiencies and yield. The work in this paper improved our previous work of using an IoT-based climate control system to regulate the cultivation environment of oyster mushrooms automatically. Even though the climate control system could produce two batches of mushroom yields, there were several limitations, such as less efficient climate control due to threshold-based corrective action, water wastage, and system instability. This paper aims to address these stated limitations by implementing a fuzzy logic algorithm and redesigned the climate control system. Two crisp input variables from DHT22 sensors representing temperature and humidity were fed into the Node MCU microcontroller’s fuzzy logic coded in C language. The temperature and humidity conditions were divided into five fuzzy trapezoidal membership functions resulting in 25 fuzzy rules to control the duration of running the water pump and ventilation fan. An internal, lightweight web server were managed all HTTP client requests. The enhanced system also included a safety measurement to avoid overheating the microcontroller and causing water wastage. Upon analysis of the data captured in two months, the result showed a decrease of 40% in water utilisation and an increase of mushrooms yield up to 226%. The enhanced climate control system also facilitated maintaining and controlling the temperature and humidity conducive for optimal mushroom cultivation.

Business Model Canvas on Paddy Straw Mushroom Cultivation Sociopreneurship (A Study on Daarul Qur'an Wal-Irsyad Wonosari Islamic Boarding School)

Business model innovation can be a strategy for developing paddy straw mushroom business in the era of increasing global competition. This study was conducted to analyze and design a business model with a business model canvas on the Sociopreneurship of Straw Mushroom Cultivation at Islamic Boarding School Daarul Qur'an Wal-Irsyad Wonosari. The analysis will be carried out on each block of Business Model Canvas which includes customer segments, value propositions, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key resources, key activities, key partnerships, and cost structure. The implementation of the business model Canvas can encourage students and the community around the Islamic boarding school to be involved in developing business models so that the right business model can be obtained and the Islamic boarding school can be economically independent. The research method used is qualitative through a phenomenological method approach by examining various observed factors related to the object under study. Data collection techniques are using surveys and interviews. The population in this study is the organizer of the Sociopreneurship of Straw Mushroom Cultivation at Daarul Qur'an Wal-Irsyad Wonosari Islamic Boarding School. Testing the validity of the data is using the triangulation technique. This technique is a multi-method approach in collecting and analyzing data that are obtained by researchers from various different perspectives so that a high level of accuracy is gained.