Many years ago, if you would ask anyone about mushrooms, very few people knew about it. However, today this same mushroom is eaten in every household in India. If we talk about its cultivation, then it also earns a lot in itself.
In 1992, Sanjeev Singh of Punjab was the only farmer who was cultivating mushrooms. After initial difficulties, today they are earning about 1.5 crore rupees annually from this farming.
How to learn mushroom cultivation
In a conversation with The Better India, Sanjeev says that he was only 25 years old when he first came to know about mushroom cultivation. He came to know about this from an agricultural program coming on Doordarshan. He thought of trying his hand at this kind of new farming.
How is Mushroom Farming Training
It does not require much space. In today’s time, more and more farming can be done with less space through vertical farming. Soil is not required for mushroom cultivation. Compost has to be put in it. That means organic manure.
At the time when Sanjeev started, so much technology was not developed at that time. So first he built a room and started farming on a metal rack. But, even before that, he did a 1-year course at the Agricultural University of Punjab. Also, at this time collected all the information about mushroom cultivation. Due to lack of much information, Sanjeev had to learn by mistake. The second problem was that its seeds had to be sourced from Delhi.
Success achieved after 8 years
The Better India
After 8 years of experimentation and failure, Sanjeev got success. Around 2001, he got success gradually. After this, in 2008, he opened his own laboratory and started selling its seeds. In some time, he started cultivating mushroom and growing its seeds in 2 acres of area. Gradually their seeds and mushrooms started reaching Himachal, Haryana and Jammu. Now the work has increased so much that they produce 7 quintals of mushroom in a day.
His annual income is close to one and a half crores. With this farming, he benefited that today he needed only 2 acres of land for 7 quintals, whereas in traditional farming, he would need about 20 acres of land.
In accordance with the Better India report, Sanjeev was awarded the award by the Punjab government in 2015 for a new type of farming. In Punjab, he is known by the name of Mushroom King.
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