Detergent & farm sanitation
Starting a new crop in a room free of pests and pathogens is the most potent and cost-eff effective tool for disease management on the mushroom farm, but it doesn’t come easily. Grow room sanitation has two distinct stages – cleaning and disinfection.
Too often, we expect our disinfectants to do the heavy lifting and presume they will eradicate the majority of the pathogens. After all, their job is to kill pathogens. But the truth is, it is the cleaning process before disinfection that removes the majority of the microbes and pathogens from a heavily soiled environment and not the disinfectant.
This article was originally produced for the Australian Mushroom Journal issue 2 2021
