Fungus. All kinds of edible fungus. That’s what’s making people rich in a few select villages in northern Jiangsu where mushrooms have been cultivated for more than 30 years.
Zhangzhai is one such village, in Fengcheng Sub District of Fengxian County in Xuzhou. There, almost every family is in the mushroom business. It’s one now worth north of ¥400 million each year. 61-year-old Zhang Chengxia is one such villager; over Chinese New Year he can make ¥6,000 every day.
Zhang Chengxia’s greenhouse regularly stocks 100,000 bags of oyster mushroom stalks, which need to be sold within 40 days before they go bad. Among them, oyster mushrooms; today very tender and particularly popular on the market. Zhang Chengxia has spent his Chinese New Year getting up daily at 05:00 and not resting until 20:00.
Making this possible are the 2,000 greenhouses in the village, every last one full of edible mushrooms.
Zhang Jingyuan is another villager who has been in the business from its beginnings in 1992. “At that time, I dug a cellar and built a shed in it to grow them; The scale was very small; only a few dozen square meters”, Zhang told the Yangtze Evening News. “At that time, there were seven or eight families growing fungus, and each family only planted two or three thousand bags.”
Zhang Jingyuan recalled that high-temperature disinfection technology was immature at the time, but as a large planter, he realised that only when fungus cultivation in the village had formed a scale could it attract merchants from all over the country.
In 1998, he tried steaming fungus in a boiler in a bathhouse and found the effect was good. In 2003, he bought a new boiler and built a pool for steaming fungus. More recently, he has also purchased a new eco-friendly boiler.
Zhang Guofang is also in on the mushroom act. Talking about the cultivation of edible mushrooms in Zhangzhai with reporters, he smiled from ear to ear, revealing that there are 540 households in the village, over 90 percent of which grow edible mushrooms.
Zhang Guofang said, “There are customers all over the country, and we don’t worry about sales at all, with an annual output value of hundreds of millions of renminbi. The villagers all bought cars and moved into new houses”.