SEEKING ALTERNATIVES TO PEAT FOR THE MUSHROOM SECTOR

Mushrooms are Ireland’s most successfully-grown horticultural crop, producing 67,000t annually or the equivalent of 6 million mushrooms harvested each day.

Grown in a straw-based substrate with a layer of peat on top, the latter is essential for the production of good crops. However, as the industry seeks alternatives to peat, driven by a move for sustainable growing mediums, finding alternatives is proving a challenge.
As part of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine funded Beyond Peat project, Teagasc researchers are trying to identify sustainable alternatives to peat.

Senior Research Officer at Teagasc, Helen Grogan explains: “We are all aware of how important peatlands are for our global eco-system; they are great reserves of carbon. They only cover about 3% of the world’s land area but they hold half of the carbon reserves. The mushroom industry, because we use peat, do have to look at trying to address that.”

As part of the Beyond Peat project, Teagasc researchers are screening a number of alternative materials, including those by-products and wastes of Irish industry and land management practices, to see how they perform in comparison to peat. Outlining this process, Eoghan Corbett, Teagasc Research Officer, said: “Getting the perfect blend is the challenge”, as the traits of individual materials are benchmarked before blending and tested once more to see how they have reacted with each other post blending.

For more on the use of alternatives to peat in the mushroom sector, watch the video on the Teagasc website at www.teagasc.ie
Replacing a unique material
Peat is a unique material and decades of research and development has been required to optimise its use in professional horticulture. Co-ordinator of the Beyond Peat Project, Michael Gaffney explains that the project is looking to replace peat in professional horticulture, across a range of production systems including mushrooms, soft fruit and perennial crops.
“What we are trying to do on the Beyond Peat project is identify materials on the island of Ireland that we can source locally that can be transformed to try and support a more sustainable horticultural sector.
“The issue really is going to be about knowing what we are going to have to change in the production process and also knowing that we will have sufficient amounts of these other materials available to growers to allow them to transition into them,” he explained.
Michael provides further details on the Beyond Peat Project  video available at www.teagasc.ie or on www.themushroompeople.com.
The videos were produced as part of the ‘10 Things to Know About…’ series, which aired on RTE and was produced by New Decade in association with EPA, the Higher Education Authority, SFI Research Centre in Applied Geosciences, the Irish Research Council, Met Eireann, the North Sea Research Programme and Teagasc.
More information on the ’10 Things to Know About…’ series is available on its website.
Also read: Beyond Peat – potential peat alternatives for Irish horticulture