The primary substrate for growing phoenix-tail mushroom (Pleurotus sajor-caju) in Taiwan is sawdust that is packed in container bags (the local farmers nickname them ‘outer-space bag’). The yearly production of phoenix-tail mushroom is about 30 million bags, which used up 36,000 ton of sawdust each year. Nevertheless, an increasingly limited supply of sawdust in recent years has caused its prices to take dramatic leaps, resulting in higher mushroom production costs. Thus, it is critical to seek for alternative substrates to replace sawdust. Cultivation of phoenix-tail mushroom on rice straw has been developed and used in many countries. After pasteurization, sterilized rice straw is mixed with large amount of spawn and then packed into the plastic bags manually. This method could not be extended to Taiwan because it is tedious and time consuming, and mushroom strains differ from the ones employed in Taiwan.

    Based on past studies on alternative substrates, if the material particulate is too big or the fiber is too long, it is difficult to make container bags with existing automatic packing machines. This retards the use of rice straw as a substrate for mushroom cultivation in Taiwan. To overcome the problem, TARI scientists have found that chopped rice straw at 1 cm length could be readily packed into container bags by existing packing machines so as to speed up the automation process.

    Taiwan produces about 1.4 million ton of rice straw annually. In conjunction with the selection of new strains of mushroom and the automation of making rice straw-based container bags, TARI’s newly developed method is able to replace 25-50% of saw dust in container bags. This translates into a saving of 9,000-18,000 ton of sawdust, thus substantially reduces mushroom production costs and contributes to the development of the mushroom industry as well as energy conservation and carbon reduction.

    Growing SJ-10 strain on the substrate of 50/50 of sawdust and rice straw, and SJ-11 strain on the substrate of 75/25 of sawdust and rice straw, the yields are 192.3 g and 222.5 g per container bag for SJ-10 and SJ-11, respectively, which are 9% and 15% more than those grown on the 100% sawdust substrate. This represents increased benefits of NT$15,000 and 22,500 per 10,000 bags for SJ-10 and SJ-11, respectively.