Agaricus Bisporus - Cultivation

Cultivation

The earliest description of the commercial cultivation of Agaricus bisporus was made by French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort in 1707. French agriculturist Olivier de Serres noted that transplanting mushroom mycelia would lead to more mushrooms. Originally, cultivation was unreliable as mushroom growers would watch for good flushes of mushrooms in fields before digging up the mycelium and replanting in beds of composted manure or inoculating 'bricks' of compressed litter, loam and manure. Spawn collected this way contained pathogens and crops would be commonly infected or not grow at all.

In 1893, sterilized, or pure culture, spawn was discovered and produced by the Pasteur Institute in Paris, for cultivation on composted horse manure. Today's commercial variety of the common mushroom was originally a light brown color. In 1926, a Pennsylvanian mushroom farmer found a clump of common mushrooms with white caps in his mushroom bed. Like white bread it was seen as a more attractive food item and was very popular. As was done with the navel orange and Red Delicious apple, cultures were grown from the mutant individuals, and most of the cream-colored store mushrooms we see today are products of this chance natural mutation.

Agaricus bisporus is now cultivated in at least 70 countries around the world. Global production in the early 1990s was reported to be more than 1.5 million tons, worth more than US$ 2 billion.