Advances in mushroom production: key to food, nutritional and employment security: A review

Mushroom is an excellent source of nutrition, tonic, medicine and dietary food items being produced and consumed all over the world. Mushrooms are rich in crude fibre, protein, vitamins, minerals, contain low fat, calories and no starch. They provide carbohydrates of high quality enhancing the human health. Mushrooms are considered as substitute for meat and its nutritional value is comparable to several vegetables. It is now considered as an important activity for recycling of agro-waste to provide better nutrition and medicinal attributes to the vegetarian population. Mushroom growing is a potential activity to convert waste into best nutritional food with high protein conversion efficiency. The world production of mushroom is about 40 million tones contributed by China, USA, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, France, Italy, Ireland, Canada and UK. India hardly produce 0.18 million tons of mushroom. There have been lot of technological advancements in methods of mushroom spawn production and quick methods of composting for button mushroom. Production technologies of oyster and shiitake have been changed from log to bag cultivation and cropping of shiitake is reduced from 3.0 to 1.5 months. Changes in production technology and diversification have led to exponential growth of mushroom production world over by doubling or tripling the farmers income within a year. Biofortification or value addition of mushroom is becoming very common to enhance quality and shelf life. Thus, mushroom cultivation has witnessed a tremendous growth. It has proved as potential source for employment generation, food, nutrition and medicine security in tribal dominating rural India. © 2020, Indian Phytopathological Society.