THE MUSH COMB SEPARATOR - SEPARATING COMPOST FROM CASING
What is our view of a modern mushroom growing farm in 10 or 20 years? The ideal seems to be a mushroom farm which is completely self-sufficient. If this is ever to be reality, time will tell. But in the meantime Mush Comb have made a very important step in the direction of this ideal.
Champost as the Dutch call it or Spent Mushroom Compost (SMC ) as we know it, is a well known cost for a mushroom farm. The SMC isn’t suitable for re-use and legal regulations make it hard for differing countries to get rid of this product. Entrepreneurs Gerard and Karin Sikes took on the challenge to find a solution for this problem. Because they had to face this problem every day in their operation of running a modern mushroom farm and related logistic services.
Sikes Champignons
Sikes Champignons is one of the biggest Dutch automatic harvesting farms. They produce about 230 tons of fresh mushrooms a week. This all for the canning industry with customers such as Lutece, which is aEuropean market leader. Besides the growing they are also involved with logistics, both for Sikes andfor other third parties. The transport takes place under the name Gesitrans.
Gesitrans handles the transport for mushrooms, vegetables, waste, clean compost, champost and the sales of champost. This activity commenced because of the rising sales costs of champost at Sikes Champignons BV and their other farm Sikes Pottevenweg BV. This was the reason to further develop in this field of work . Other growers were walking around with the same ideas, 8 of them are already customer of Gesitrans. Two of them are also very big growers. In total they handle about 1400 tons of champost every week.
Mush Comb
A first solution could be in separating the compost from the casing. To look at these possibilities the cooperation was started with Mush Comb.
Both Sikes Champignons as well as Mush Comb displayed a great incentive to search for innovative solutions to current problem areas. This fruitful cooperation has already led to a new, innovative machine. Now it is possible to successfully separate your compost and casing. This is process is realized during the emptying of the growing rooms.
The Casing Separator can be placed between the emptying winch and the shelving. Bottleneck problems in the development were in available space, speed, transport, etc. The biggest challenge was of course finding a way to separate the casing from the compost. To realize this, a number of tests have been carried out, in order to find the best solution. Results from these tests showed that working with a screw gives the best result for removing the mushroom casing.
The Casing Separator is a 1-arm machine. By using telescopic arms the machine is rendered compact in transport and storage. The Casing Separator can be placed on every desirable bed height. It is placed against the shelving - for that reason it includes a support frame. On the other side the emptying winch is placed. The winch doesn’t change in its functionality. But before the champost / SMC reaches the winch, it is guided through the Casing Separator. This takes care of separating the casing and unloads it on a conveyor in the middle aisle.
During emptying it was no problem to reach a speed of 17 meters per minute. This is a speed which most growers worldwide don’t reach. But it shows without any doubt that there is no extra limitation in emptying. It actually creates the opportunity to increase your emptying speed.
Advantages:
A summary of some of the advantages of this development:
•An instant advantage for the Dutch grower is lower transport costs. The champost and compost is not allowed to unload in Netherlands, the casing is allowed. By separating the casing from the compost, the casing doesn’t need to be transported to Germany but just around the corner on the farm. Thus more space is left in the trailer so more compost can be transported to Germany.
•The possibility to re-use casing soil. Now this is divided from the compost the road is open for this development. Our partner Sikes Champignons is already far advanced in the development of re-using the casing soil.
•The compost which is brought to a burning oven has a higher efficiency. Because the wet casing is removed, the remaining compost burns better, which gives more energy than when burning the champost/ SMC.
•The possibility to also re-use compost, no matter in what way. An example can be to burn the compost on your own farm - to produce energy with a waste product.
•Reduce your carbon footprint.
•Less sales of champost. The grower gets less dependent on this market. And fewer sales can become an advantage. Because when there is a shortage of champost/SMC on the market then this brings more perspective to get a good price for your champost.
•Possibility to increase your emptying speed.
Mush Comb explicitly made the Casing Separator suitable for use on all shelving farms worldwide. From now on every grower has the possibility to separate their compost and casing.
