About mushroom cultivation....?

Question

I'm researching about mushrooms. I want to calculate the biological efficiency of oyster mushroom. I have read that B.E is the fresh weight of mushroom divided by the dry weight of the compost. I want to know if I should consider the dried weight of spawn as a part of compost for computing Biologocal Efficiency or not? Please also attach the URL of the reference. If so I'll thank you in the acknowledgement sector of the article I'm writing about.

Answer 1

m.k., When I first read your question my first thought was that the weight of the spawn alone would be so insignificant that it would not matter.  But common sense would tell you that you would not include spawn weight. However. if you are getting your spawn in a sawdust media, as most come in, then you would have less error by including the spawn in the dry weight of the media, since the spawn  itself is practically weight less.  The more I  thought about your question the more the formula didn't make any sense to me. If you were calculating the biological efficiency of a mushroom why would not use the dry weight of the mushroom.  After all the water involved wouldn't have anything to do with a mushroom's biological efficiency.  Anyway, I looked up several articles, including the ones listed above, and found that was indeed the formula that they were using. But by reading the articles I realized that they were estimating the efficiency of the mushrooms, They are estimating the biological efficiency of different media in producing fresh mushrooms.  So to measure the Biological Efficiency of the Oyster mushroom you will have to determine the dry weight of the media and divide that into the dry weight of the mushrooms.  To have your experiment mean anything you are going to include a comparison to at least one more type of mushroom, and more would be a lot better, using a common substrate. Read the articles carefully and you will see that what they are testing is the efficiency of different substrates. Before investing a lot of work into this research, I would suggest that you consult with a trusted professor.  I am an agronomy professor (PhD) with a lot of experience in research, retired, but I still know what I am talking about here.

Answer 2

Para IV (End of page 2 of this) defines how BE is calculated. The weight of spawn is not included.

http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/Organics/Farming...

A few more sites:

http://www.apms.org/japm/vol41/v41p122.p...

http://www.pjbs.org/pjnonline/fin196.pdf

http://www.springerlink.com/content/u1w2...

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/kl...

http://www.actahort.org/books/434/434_49...

If you do use any info in these links please give a reference.

Leave this responder out of any acknowledgment. He is just a postman.(He did post this)