By Gabrielle Wade
20 July 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: 16 July 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: Ten years ago, Chido Govera was a 12-year-old orphan living outside Mutare, Zimbabwe, working to support herself after her mother died of AIDS, when she was given the opportunity to learn mushroom farming. Today, she is a key contributor to the success of mushroom farming projects throughout Africa, Colombia and India.
Mushrooms have proven to be viable crops farming in many areas, specifically in Namibia where there are already five functioning projects in Katutura, Heneties Bay, Okaku, Ogongo, and Gobabis and a sixth launched last week in Mariental.
The first mushroom training sessions began in Namibia in 2003, and since then mushroom cultivation has proved beneficial to the locals in all five areas with active projects.
The projects are based on the principle of the Zero Emissions Research Initiative (ZERI) Africa Regional Project, which aims to create farms that use agro and forestry waste as energy. ZERI founder Gunter Pauli explained to MediaGlobal, “the waste of one is food for another belonging to another kingdom. There are five kingdoms in nature; bacteria, algae, fungus, plants and animals. So the waste of a plant often not edible for an animal is best converted into a nutrient or energy source by a fungus,” such as a mushroom.
By basing the mushroom farms on the ZERI principle, the farmers are able to keep the costs of the projects extremely low. Pauli said, “The cost to set a community with 10 to 20 women up is less than 500 dollars, and then there is food for people and animals and the chance to generate biogas.”
cultivated by communities trained by ZERI. (Photo Courtesy: ZERI)
The projects receive funding primarily from ZERI, NEDBANK Namibia and the UNDP, and the University of Namibia was responsible for the development of the technology for mushroom cultivation in Namibia.
Once villages have adequate funds, Govera’s job is crucial to the projects because she hosts training courses for villages wishing to create their own mushroom farms. When the villages are chosen, Govera, and others like her, will host training sessions for each village. In the sessions, one group of 25 future farmers learns the process of farming mushrooms each week, in a process that lasts one month. After that month, a second session is held as a follow-up to monitor progress.
The goal of the project is for 100 farmers distributed over a few villages to farm an adequate number of mushrooms to feed the locals. Following the ZERI principle, farmers could use the waste created from farming mushrooms as animal feed, which would allow the farms to have more chickens or even goats, as goats are known to thrive on the type of waste created by mushrooms.
Currently, the projects in Namibia are small-scale and their key role is to eliminate malnutrition and respond to local needs. Pauli said the rule on exports is to “only export the top quality at top prices, typically not exceeding 10 percent of total production since the goal is to satisfy basic needs of people with what is locally available.”
At the recent launch of the Hardap Mushroom Project in Mariental, officials showed interest in changing the projects’ goals. Minister of Agriculture, Water and Forestry John Mutorwa called on Namibian scientists to develop technologies that would allow locals to farm mushrooms as a cash crop, and a plant production research officer agreed that mushrooms could be profitable to farmers.