Mushroom Cultivation Powers Rural Livelihoods Across India

A backgrounder from the Press Information Bureau sets out how mushroom cultivation has grown into a livelihood option within India's horticulture sector, drawing in farmers, women and rural youth who have little land and little capital to spare.

Why mushrooms suit small holdings

Mushrooms carry little in the way of calories, fat and carbohydrate, while supplying protein, dietary fibre, vitamins and minerals. They can be raised in a small space, in villages as well as in towns and on their fringes. Farm waste serves as the growing medium, so the crop needs less land, less water and less money than most conventional farming. Cultivation moves through composting, spawning, casing, pinning, cropping and harvesting. Spawning mixes the seed with compost, casing lays soil over the compost to hold moisture, and pinning is the stage at which tiny pinheads appear.

From waste picker to grower

Ruthu of Ippatam village in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh, was working as a waste picker at the age of 20. A short course under the Skill Training for Rural Youth scheme at Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Guntur, run with SAMETI of Andhra Pradesh and the National Institute of Agricultural Extension Management at Hyderabad, taught her milky mushroom production. She now supplies the local market and earns about Rs 35,000 a month.

The Mushroom Village of Bihar

Anita Devi began in 2010 with the Krishi Vigyan Kendra at Harnaut block, Nalanda district. As oyster and milky white mushrooms spread through Anantpur and the villages around it, the State Agriculture Department declared Anantpur a Mushroom Village in 2012, and she came to be called the Mushroom Mahila. She set up a spawn laboratory with a Rs 15 lakh subsidy from the National Horticulture Mission and floated Madhopur Farmers Producers Company Limited. By 2023 more than 250 women of Jeevika Self-Help Groups were working in this trade in Nalanda.

Engineers and hill farmers

Anjanaben Gamit, a civil engineer from Tapi in Gujarat, started oyster mushrooms in 2017 in a shed of 15 by 10 feet; her first crop of about 140 kg fetched Rs 28,000 against a cost of Rs 11,000. Hiresha Verma of Charba village near Dehradun began in 2013 with 25 bags and now runs Han Agrocare, which employs 15 people and has trained more than 2,000 women and farmers in the hills.