The Importance Of Mushroom

1.0 INTRODUCTION Chang and Miles (1992) defined mushroom as a macroscopic fungus possessing a distinctive fruiting body formed above or under the ground and big enough to be observed by naked eyes or harvested by hand. Simply, mushroom is just a fruiting body of a fungus to assist the dispersal of spores to extended areas while its vegetative part is the thread-like mycelium that is able to penetrate through the surface on which the fungus is growing (Chang, 2008). 1.1 Importance of mushroom World’s population is expected to approach 9.7 billion in the year 2050 hence there is a great demand to sustain this ever-growing population (United Nations, 2015). To add, it had been estimated that 70% of agricultural and forest materials has not being effectively used and ended

Temperature of the mushroom house is kept around 25-28°C. It is also important to maintain the humidity at70-90% level. To control the humidity, water-spraying tool (Fig. 3) is installed near the roof in which the walls and floor will only be sprayed thrice a day. Mushroom house is also preventing direct exposure to sunlight as the mushroom cultivation only need scattered light. Ventilation is also necessary for such cultivation hence mushroom house usually built without doors or the doors are kept open. Mushrooms usually start appearing 7-10 days after its incubation in mushroom house. Mushroom is considered mature 2-3 days after it first sprouted (Fig. 4) and can finally be harvested.

3.0 RESULTS Brunei Agricultural Research Centre has produced three commercialized mushrooms which are locally known as Rose Sabah (straw) mushroom, Tiram (oyster) mushroom and Tembibir mushroom. Oyster mushroom scientifically falls under the genus Pleurotus while Tembibir (Fig. 5) belongs to Auricularia genus and Rose Sabah (Fig. 6) belongs Volvariella genus. These mushrooms are classified as “Basidiomycota”.

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