Mushroom is known for its nutritional and medicinal qualities and benefits. There is a need to enhance these beneficial aspects among the rural and semi urban people. This can be achieved by selling the fresh mushrooms at consumers doorstep. This can be achieved at larger scale by growing mushroom in ICAR-IIHR outdoor mobile chambers and take the flushing growing bags in the Solar power operated tricycle cart for vending fresh mushroom to the consumer for vending. It will make mushroom as a part of daily diet which can help in mitigation of malnutrition.
It can be suitable both at rural and urban levels. Presently most of the growers are packing the mushrooms and selling through the push cart vendors or stores. The shelf life of these packages is 2-3 days. The newly designed solar powered tricycle cart holds the mushroom growing bags and the mushrooms are harvested and sold to the consumers at their doorstep. It facilitates the consumers to select the quality of mushroom from the growing bags to their choice and take home the freshly harvested mushroom.It can also help in customization of selling the produce in terms of freshly plucked mushroom, different coloured oyster mushrooms, mushroom vegetable combos, bags at different harvesting stages of mushrooms according to consumer preference. It can be one
The overall dimension of the mushroom bags holding chamber is 1.5 x 1 x 1 m which is made up of aluminium frames and fittings.It is covered with nylon 40 mesh to protect the entry of insects and to facilitate the aeration.It is further covered with locally available gunny bag all around and it is wetted to maintain humidity inside the chamber. It can hold 36 Nos of 1 kg/2kg bags inside the chamber.A 30 W DC misting diaphragm pump used to wet the gunny bags to manage relative humidity through evaporative cooling inside the chamber.It can be operated either by electric power or using Solar power system with 300 W panel, inverter, 12V storage battery and a timer.The entire growing chamber is mounted on a tricycle frame.The tricycle is powered by a 48V , 750 W DC geared motor. A voltage controller and Lithium Ion battery of 24 Ah is used to store solar power to source DC power to geared motor and mist pump. The solar panels are mounted on the roof top of the frame.