Recently, in the end of January 2023, UMDIS Mushroom Information Agency made a special tour for growers from abroad to see Polish farms. The tour was sponsored by Agro-Projects.
According to all building plans Polish mushroom growing area in 2022 planned to be around 250 hectares. UMDIS wrote about this here: https://www.umdis.org/polish-pickers-work-at-a-speed-of-19-23-kg-h/ That`s substantially more than in 2021. Polish mushroom business is growing. So, we wanted to see the farms that now increase their growing area. Recently we have seen Sopinscy farm – find the article hear https://www.umdis.org/how-do-the-poles-pick-up-to-40-kg-m2-why-are-they-ready-to-give-mushrooms-to-cooperatives-and-how-to-manage-90-growing-rooms/ .This time we went to Suchożebry and Łukasz Łaziuk mushroom farms. Both are on the East of Poland.
First farm Suchożebry is owned by two families – Grabowski and Pałka. The farm had more than 20 rooms – and now they build 30 new ones. As we were told – normal time to build and put into operation 30 rooms is like a year, more or less.
In the time where we visited the farm not all of the rooms were equipped. As you see on the photo – some of them are like the entrance to the future. However, this future is coming very soon.
As we were told – 16 new rooms are already put into the operation.-Why not to put all 30 rooms into operation simultaneously? – I asked.
-That`s hard to find so many people to work at once. Also, organization is easier this way.
Anyway, while some rooms are in the process of becoming equipped by specialists – other rooms already work and earn you money by mushrooms growing in them.The second farm Łaziuk is the member of GL Group cooperative. That means they sell mushrooms not by themselves.
The owner of the farm is Łaziuk family – Łukasz and Katarzyna. Their investment is also 30 rooms (12 a bit older and 18 much newer). Recently they put them into operation. Every room is for 40 tones of compost. The farm is very beautiful, with modern office and a special mascot living in it. The mascot is called Majlo, a small friendly dog.
The compost used here is Kania and Agaris. We came accurate at a time of loading the room by new Agro-Project`s Hermes filling machine and Atlas hopper. By the way, despite the increasing cost of electricity and gas the farm continuously uses cook-out of rooms – that makes possible to collect the third flash.
-We made the simple calculation – how much we spent on cookout and how much we earn on the third break. And decided to keep cookout. We are pretty sure we cannot grow third break without cooking because the diseases would not give us such chances, – tells us the technologist.
Usual yield here is like 33 kg per m2.
-Do you have the problem with lack of pickers? – wondered I.
-Not really. After the war in Ukraine has started, we realized that we have more pickers than we need as we don`t want to fire anyone from Ukraine as they cannot go home. We also had some refugees working here for a while. However, many of them decided to go to Germany. Now we have new group from Nepal, – explains us the chief of the picking department.
-Is it hard to train them?
-Previously we trained people for 7 days – now we can either train them for 5 days, either understand that they cannot be the pickers. Not wasting additional 2 days. Most of our pickers and leaders are from Ukraine – so we teach new pickers from Nepal not English or Polish but Ukrainian. In some days they already know many words. And as you see in some days they can pick by themselves, just the leader goes from one to the other to check and help them.
During this conversation in the room the chief of the picking department out of the corner of her eye sees that the new picker took smaller mushroom that she was supposed to. She goes to her, takes the rulers which light near her, takes the mushroom – and neatly throws the mushroom inside the ruler. It falls. That should show that the mushroom was too small and encourages her to be more attentive. And really – the woman nods and takes other mushroom – accurate right according to the side.
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