I was just feeling unoccupied and had lots of free time. In fact i didn’t know what to do with the ample time that lay at my disposal. It had really been this situation that took me to the lookout for some productive enterprise. I have discussed it among our family members. Although, we were all of the same opinion to start something new and productive, we could not pinpoint an area to begin with. We agreed upon one thing that it ought to be something we could do together, leisurely and conveniently. While discussions and deliberations were going on, our agricultural officer asked me to attend a training program organised by the newly formed Rural Technology Training Centre, Aroor on Mushroom cultivation. Dr. A.V Mathew, himself a genuine authority on mushroom cultivation, from the Regional Agricultural Research Station of Kerala Agricultural University led the session. Thereafter the Director of the centre and the local Agircultural Officer gave us the motivation to start mushroom cultivation. The balcony of my house was chosen to house the enterprise for trial run. We visited many mushroom cultivating centres from Trivandrum to Palghat and certain places in Tamilnadu. Started doing the trial with 5 to 10 beds. We jointly did all the work, it was interesting. We shared the mushroom produced among ourselves, gave it to neighbors, friends and relatives and it continued for an year. We share the pains and gains. We still remember one occasion that turned us sad when 200 of our mushroom beds developed fungus attack. We did not lose our spirit, we did overcome the crisis by finding practical solutions. That was a confidence booster.
Now mushroom cultivation has begun to bring in rather big revenue; we have gone through several testing situations and have come out of them all successfully. We have now built a big two storeyed shed with good infrastructure facilities of National standard. We also have started producing spawn in our lab. Our products have been branded as COONFRESH. In fact we are the first to brand mushroom, its spawn and value added products in Kerala. We assure the quality and the branding helped us to gain the faith of the public. Mushroom has brought new hopes to our lives. We envisage a mushroom village in our panchayath and more in the blocks and finally in the state and country.
How I got into this mushroom field
