UMDIS consultant Iurie Boiciuc works with farms from dozens of countries and has more than 20 years of experience. You can find more information here.

We asked Iurie to tell you how to choose a consultant for growing mushrooms? For what period should you invite him and what difficulties might you encounter?

How to hire a good mushroom growing consultant ?
1. First of all, it’s worth checking whether the consultant has experience growing by himself for a long time. That his knowledge is practice, not theory. You have the right to ask him directly about this.
2. There should be good reviews about the consultant. Request the phone numbers of several clients with whom you can communicate.
3. Discuss with the consultant that he is ready to work on your farm not just visit. Some consultants prefer to come for 2-3 days, point out errors – but do not have experience in correcting them, which includes working with your staff, changing the methods and technology familiar to your farm.
4. Choose a consultant who is confident in himself and knows what he is doing. There is a difference between “let’s try” and “I know exactly how to help your farm.”

How long should the first visit be long?

1. If you want a consultant to teach growers and staff from scratch, the consultant must be present for 4 weeks every season and support online when he is not on your farm. This schedule is required for 2 years.
Why is that? The staff will not learn in the first 4 weeks. There are no formulas in mushroom growing – the rooms are different, the situations are also different. You need to make sure that your staff can check with the consultant online so as not to make big mistakes. Every 2 months the season changes, the outdour conditions change – and the technological process changes accordingly.
Why 2 years? After winter, a person forgets how he grew last summer – and only after 2 years he is already a full-fledged technologist.
2. If you have an experienced grower on your farm, or you are an experienced grower yourself, it will take about 3 weeks. Why? Because from loading to the end of the first flash is just 3 weeks, during this time you can see the result and you can show how to correct the second flash in rooms that started without a consultant.
3. If the consultant already knows your farm, you can invite him to a verification visit for 3-4 days. If you have a good production grower who will accept the consultant’s comments and be able to implement them himself. During this time, you can see problems and explain to technologists how to solve them.
What difficulties may you have?
What difficulties might you face as an owner? Based on the experience of consulting dozens of farms, in about 60% of cases growers turn out to be somewhat rigid and do not want to change their usual growing systems. Partly because they think they know everything, partly because they are too lazy to make changes when it’s not their farm. As a result, if you invited a consultant for 3 days – but the grower did not implement the change and there was no result – you will have wasted your money. In such cases, it is worth inviting a consultant for at least 3 weeks so that he can show you and your growers the result.
Why do you take a risk when you invite a consultant for the first time for less than 3 weeks?
Let’s use an example. You paid the consultant for 1 week, invested your time and your grower`s time. The consultant started the rooms correctly – and left.
You are in the middle of cooldown – here it takes 5 hours to ruin the room. You can ensure that there will be almost no mushrooms if you make makes the evaporation too high – because the spawn will dry out. If the evaporation is too low, bacteriosis, mold will appear, and there will be a rare room.
This happened to one of our clients when, due to snowfall, the grower simply did not come to the farm for 2 days. The rooms started by the consultant were damaged. You don’t understand whether the consultant’s advice works and whether to continue to apply it.
If you are not ready to invite a consultant for a long period of time – but your growers are ready to cooperate – you can try to take 10 days, and then online. The consultant will check the technologist and the likelihood of errors will be reduced to a minimum.
What to do if a grower does not show results and does not want to learn?
Based on the experience of our clients, it is often more effective to invite a consultant and train a new grower from scratch than to retrain someone who does not want it. This is the experience of our clients from several countries.
But it is important to understand something else. Sometimes your growers make mistakes not because they don’t know. They just do the same work every day on the same farm – and over time they do not notice their mistakes. The eye becomes blurred.
That’s why it’s so important to invite a consultant at least occasionally – as an outside perspective he will help the grower to open eyes to where he can improve his results.

You can ask about Iurie Boiciuc` schedule on our Facebook page.