Looking back at January 1990, former MGA chairman Peter Cracknell was quoted from the Mushroom Journal referring to the ‘bogeyman’ of the UK mushroom growers. No guesses who that referred to.
Same man was lamenting the lack of biological control of pests. He was hoping that the next decade would finally see the emergence of such controls. He remembered in 1969 a young American scientist working at a research centre in England studying nematodes that ate mushroom flies’ eggs.
Skip forward to January 2000, and Walsh Mushrooms were on the front page offering light at the end of your tunnel. ‘Preventing Overlay’ was the science article from Dave Seaby of the Applied Plant Science division at DANI - there was even a questionnaire for growers to fill in. And the labour supply crisis affecting the Irish horticultural industry was being examined by Brendan Dunleavey.
Forward to 2010 and JFM were offering Eco Quilt for your tunnel insulation. Stecrckx phase III and Hooymans compost were both advertised. Farmers in the South were demanding a mandatory grocery code, and there was the perennial question asked - should you wash mushrooms?
