Tourist maps and guidebooks call it Mushroom Street, though the “street” actually looks more like a rural two-lane road. It starts out in the eastern suburbs of Taichung City, central Taiwan, leading up to and passing through the city’s Xinshe District, before beginning the incline toward the mountain range further east. Because of the plethora of mushrooms that can be seen almost everywhere one looks when traveling along Mushroom Street, however, the “mushroom” part could not be more accurate.
Along the length of Mushroom Street and in the neighboring side streets, Xinshe residents are often found sitting in front of their shops, scissors clicking away as they trim the stems of the most recent mushroom harvest. Both local and foreign tourists occasionally wander past snapping photos. For a decade Xinshe has proudly promoted its key crop, and fans of fungi can spend the day visiting the black-tarped, pick-your-own growing sheds in the area and purveying shops filled with torpedo-sized plastic bags of dried and fresh varieties. There are also restaurants serving fungi-themed nouvelle cuisine, and street vendors selling mushroom ice cream.
Xinshe used to be a typical hillside agricultural community that farmed a more diverse mix of crops. Today, however, sheds dedicated to the production of Lentinula edodes, or the shiitake mushroom, can be seen throughout the town. “No one had realized that shiitake can grow at this altitude, until the teacher showed everyone how to go about it,” says Hou Wen-liang (侯文亮), proprietor of Ah Liang’s Mushroom Garden, a leisure farm in Xinshe located on Mushroom Street, which is officially called Xiezhong Street.
The teacher in question is Wang You-ching (王幼青), a Xinshe native who as a 22-year-old elementary school teacher decided to cultivate shiitake in his hometown. That was two decades ago, when it was believed that the mushroom species could only be grown at high altitudes. Wang proved this notion wrong, and by 1987 he was producing shiitake on 20 hectares of Xinshe land. Wang later moved on to the cultivation of Pleurotus eryngii, commonly known as the king oyster mushroom in Taiwan, and he now has the largest environmentally controlled mushroom production facility in the country. His four-hectare farm and factory, Qingsong Farms, produces six to seven metric tons of fresh king oyster mushrooms annually. Locals believe it is the largest factory of its kind in Asia, excluding government-operated facilities.
“Mushroom production is more stable in a controlled environment,” Wang says. “For example, king oyster mushrooms mature in two months. Shiitake, on the other hand, are grown outdoors under unpredictable weather conditions and take six months.”
Wang may be the patron saint of Xinshe mushroom growers, but the Council of Agriculture’s Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute (TARI) provides guidance on mushroom cultivation to a much larger growing area in Taichung, Nantou and Changhua counties in central Taiwan. TARI’s Edible and Medicinal Mushroom Laboratory, which is led by Shih Hsin-der (石信德), is the primary source of this guidance. Located in Taichung’s Wufeng District, the laboratory’s six staff members help keep tabs on the problems that farmers are facing while also watching for new research opportunities. “TARI is unique in Taiwan,” explains Shih, “in that it’s the only agricultural research facility with land for experimental cultivation. Universities and colleges have agricultural programs but no cultivation areas. It’s our responsibility to provide this service to the industry.”
Within walking distance of Shih’s office are 128 hectares of irrigated research paddy fields that form a quiltwork pattern of various rice cultivars to be used for experimentation. There are also small patches of fruit trees and stands of sugarcane as well as polyethylene-covered beds of seedlings and Quonset hut-style buildings for growing mushrooms.
A greenhouse for king oyster mushrooms (Photo by Chang Su-ching)
Almondy Sweetness
Today the king oyster is one of the most popular mushrooms in Taiwan, appreciated for its flavorful flesh, thick meaty caps and stems and hint of almondy sweetness. Altogether, growers like Wang produce more than 20,000 metric tons of king oyster mushrooms each year worth more than NT$1 billion (US$33.3 million). But a lot of hard work went into making this happen. Shih’s laboratory played an important role in the successful cultivation of the king oyster mushroom. “The king oyster mushroom is rarely found in the wild. Former TARI plant pathologist J.T. Peng (彭金騰), now retired, became known as the father of the king oyster in Taiwan after he brought it to the country from France for breeding,” Shih says.
Mushrooms may seem like a simple form of flora, and at a phylogenetic level they are, but biologically they belong to the diverse fungi family, which is the second-largest group of organisms in the entire global ecosystem after the insect family. The “Training Manual on Mushroom Cultivation Technology” prepared by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) states that roughly 70,000 fungi have been identified out of an estimated 1.5 million fungal species in existence. Between 14,000 and 15,000 of these produce relatively large fruiting bodies, of which more than 2,000 are regarded as edible, but that does not mean they are easy to cultivate. According to the UNESCAP report, only about 100 types of mushroom are known to have been grown experimentally, while a mere 30 species have been commercially cultivated, with less than a dozen cultivated for industrial purposes.
The king oyster is vulnerable to soil micro-organisms and sensitive to temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, air ventilation and light intensity, making it rather difficult to find in the wild. For this reason, breeding the mushroom initially proved to be a difficult task. After introducing the species to Taiwan, Peng first worked to improve the king oyster’s taste. Once he had a palate-pleasing strain, he needed to develop a commercial cultivation protocol that would allow this native of the Mediterranean to thrive in Taiwan. The protocol had to include every detail that a grower needs to know in order to nurture the mushroom through its entire life cycle from spore to fruiting body. Peng opted for a version of the Japanese bottle method, which allows for indoor cultivation under environmentally controlled conditions using sterilized plastic or glass bottles to hold the substrate. Peng’s work was never patented once he had perfected the protocol in 1991. It was made available to the world, and variations of it are now used in Japan, mainland China and South Korea.
In fact, TARI’s mushroom laboratory has introduced several important edible mushrooms, which are now all prominently displayed on refrigerated shelves in Taiwan’s supermarkets. These include the winter mushroom introduced to Taiwan in 1972, shiitake in 1974 and king oyster in 1991, among others. Mushrooms are a high value agricultural commodity, and according to TARI, account for 18 percent of the production value of Taiwan’s vegetable industry, earning an annual revenue of about NT$8.8 billion (US$293 million).
More than a thousand households—1081, to be exact—in Xinshe produce mushrooms, according to the Taiwan Mushroom Development Association, which has its main office on Xiezhong Street. Many are second or third generation growing operations, passed on from father to son, says TARI’s Shih. Farms tend to get smaller as land is divided among heirs, so farmers must often rent land in order to expand their growing operations. Nevertheless, nearly all mushroom-growing facilities in Taiwan are family-run.
Nowadays all of the nation’s mushrooms are consumed domestically because prohibitive land and labor costs prevent Taiwan from competing as a regional or global mushroom exporter. However, this has not always been the case. In fact, mushrooms were one of Taiwan’s first successful export products. As a younger man, Shih witnessed this phenomenal growth in Taiwan’s mushroom export industry. “At that time,” he says, “everywhere you looked in Wufeng, you could see mushroom sheds.” In particular, everyone wanted in on the business of exporting the common white button mushroom, Agaricus bisporus, to the United States.
The Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute’s Edible and Medicinal Mushroom Laboratory provides local farmers with guidance on the cultivation of various species of mushrooms. (Photo courtesy of Wu Kuan-ze, Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute)
The white button boom dates back to the early 1950s. The Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), which was established in mainland China in 1948 and relocated to Taiwan along with the Republic of China (ROC) government in 1949, played a key role in directing foreign aid in Taiwan. One of the JCRR’s many goals was to develop an export crop that could generate foreign exchange.
In a paper titled “Models of Rural Development Administration: the JCRR Experience in Taiwan” that was presented in 1968 to the Asia Society, a New York City-based nonprofit organization working to educate the world about Asia, Richard Lee Hough writes: “Early in the 1950s, JCRR’s technical staff began to work on the possibilities of introducing artificial mushroom cultivation to Taiwan.” Hough goes on to say, “Temperature conditions were excellent for mushroom growing and most of the needed materials such as spawn, fertilizers and bamboo were locally available in abundant quantity at little cost. Given that mushrooms could be grown in vacant rooms of farmers’ homes or in bamboo sheds, their cultivation as a sideline cash crop appeared to be a natural.”
There was one shortcoming that impeded this endeavor, however. At the time, Taiwan was facing a shortage of horse manure, which had long been a traditional substrate for mushroom cultivation, writes Hough. The JCRR and TARI began experimenting with substrate alternatives in 1954 with a tiny budget of US$594.
The end result of this project was a synthetic compost of chemical fertilizers and rice stock, or alternatively, wheat or citronella grass stocks. In a pilot project, 100 retired servicemen were settled in central Taiwan’s mountainous Xibao Village, Hualien County and Lishan Village, then Taichung County, where they began growing mushrooms in simple bamboo sheds with thatched roofing. Trial exports began three years later in 1957, and Taiwan’s white buttons found ready buyers in US canned food companies such as the Borden Co. and the Green Giant Co. The program was so successful that 80 percent of the mushrooms sold in the United States in fiscal year 1963-64 were from Taiwan’s central mountains.
Faced with these sudden riches, Taiwan set voluntary export limits to appease American mushroom growers. “By 1963, an approximate 50,000 farmers were growing mushrooms with another 25,000 people involved in the processing and commercial ends,” writes Hough. “The Commission is indeed proud of the story, which was opened by one of its inconspicuous and small ‘innovative-type projects.’”
Food security is a major part of TARI’s agenda, and the institute is working to ensure that crop cultivation can adapt to changing circumstances. One recent problem in Taiwan’s mushroom industry has been a diminishing supply of sawdust—a key mushroom-growing substrate—due to the gradual decline of the country’s woodworking industries. To circumvent this issue, TARI has developed growing substrates from rice straw and a host of other agricultural wastes. Composting has also been brought indoors, helping speed up the fermentation process and eliminate the lingering odor of fermentation on farms.
Shih explained the large number of plant pathologists on the roster of TARI’s mushroom laboratory by saying: “Even mushrooms are susceptible to illness.” The finicky fungi can also underperform when growing conditions are disrupted, which is now a problem in Xinshe. The weather has changed over the past two decades, and shiitake growers are reporting declining yields, from 300 grams per bag to as little as 100 grams per bag. In order to address this issue, TARI is currently developing a new climate-tolerant strain of shiitake that could be ready for cultivation before the end of the year.
Noodles developed at Asia University with snow fungus as a primary ingredient (Photo Courtesy of Lin Chien-yih, Asia University)
Health and Nutrition
TARI is not the only research group in Taiwan that focuses on mushrooms. Asia University is also located in Wufeng, with its tall spires visible from across the TARI rice paddies. Lin Chien-yih (林俊義), who once served as director general at TARI, is dean of the university’s College of Medical and Health Science, and runs the Edible and Medicinal Mushroom Research Center.
Lin and six fellow scientists at the center perform research on mushroom cultivation techniques. They are also exploring the functional properties of the many nutrients in mushrooms as well as developing a range of new health and beauty products from the fungi. “Five years ago, there was a surge in interest in this area,” Lin explains. “The nutritional properties of edible mushrooms is one area. But researchers have also begun investigating the anti-cancer and anti-oxidant properties of chemical compounds such as polysaccharides.”
Many products can be made from the extracted polysaccharides, Lin says, and in his office is a display of commercial products that have resulted from cooperation between Asia University and Taiwan’s food and beauty product manufacturers. One such item is a silver bottle of skin moisturizer; another is a package of rejuvenating facial masks, next to which is an amber-colored bar of mushroom soap. Other products include a bottle of an organic white jelly drink and packets of a soup mix produced by a local biomedical firm. White jelly (Tremella fuciformis), which is also known as snow fungus, white wood fungus and silver ear fungus, is the key ingredient for all of these products. Until recently, nearly all of it was imported from mainland China. Lin and his research team developed a new strain of the fungi, and created and patented a fully automated, organic cultivation system for the mushroom.
As a popular food ingredient in Taiwan, white jelly is often simply boiled, chilled and sweetened into a crunchy dessert. Native to the mountains of Taiwan and mainland China’s Fujian province, it is found on the trunks of dead trees. “White jelly has been eaten for hundreds of years, and it was always simply gathered in the wild,” Lin says. “Then about 30 years ago, a cultivation method was developed. Holes were drilled into dead wood, filled with sawdust and inoculated with white jelly spawn. That’s how it’s still produced in mainland China.”
Lin and his team began work on developing a cultivar that could thrive indoors under environmentally controlled conditions. A strain of the mushroom they found in the mountains near Alishan about five years ago is much whiter—and more aesthetically pleasing to consumers—than white jelly imported from mainland China. However, figuring out how to cultivate it proved somewhat difficult because fungi, like all organisms, adapt themselves to specific environmental niches. Ultimately, the scientist discovered that the white jelly would flourish if raised on a substrate of sawdust from broadleaf trees that had been mixed with a companion fungus, Hypoxylon archeri. “Two micro-organisms were needed—one to produce the compost, and the other was the white jelly,” Lin says. “That is where the difficulty arose.”
Lin’s white jelly is cultivated in substrate-filled bottles using an automated, environmentally controlled system for which he received two patents. He could not, however, patent his white jelly strain. “Mushrooms are not patentable because the government cannot perform the DNA analysis necessary to prove infringement,” he said.
“Sixty percent of white jelly is made up of polysaccharides, and there is a lot you can do with it,” Lin says. “We will continue to investigate its functional properties.”
Likewise, experimentation on many levels—medicinal, nutritional, scientific as well as for the pure culinary pleasure—will continue on the vast variety of mushrooms available in Taiwan, and perhaps one day Taiwan’s mushroom products will see a return to their glorious days in overseas markets.
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Glenn Smith is a freelance writer based in Taipei.
Copyright © 2014 by Glenn Smith