Webinar Recording: Compost Biomarkers - a crystal ball for mushroom yield and quality?
Dr Michael Kertesz is Associate Professor for Soil Microbiology in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. His research interests focus on how bacteria and fungi react to changes in their surroundings, especially in soil and compost, and on fungus-bacterial-plant interactions.
In recent years he has concentrated on unravelling the dynamics of the microbial communities that are essential in the production of mushroom compost, identifying the organisms that are present at different stages of the composting and cropping process, and how this is influenced by changes in substrate and composting conditions. How work aims to optimize composting efficiency, and identify key organisms (or groups of organisms) that interact directly with the Agaricus mycelium to promote healthy mushroom fruitbody formation.
Description: Button mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) are grown commercially in Australia on a specialised compost prepared from wheat straw and poultry manure. The quality of this compost is critically important for high mushroom yields, but the methods used to measure compost quality have not changed much in the last forty years.
These methods currently depend largely on a limited number of chemical assays (mainly C and N content, ammonia, pH, ash and moisture) and on the empirical personal expertise developed by composters over years of experience. In recent years chemical analysis has been supplemented by near - or mid-infrared (NIR/MIR) - spectroscopy, but this is mainly used to maintain compost parameters in an acceptable window, rather than to predict crop yields.
Recent advances in technology have now provided unprecedented new detail on the biology of mushroom composting, raising the possibility of using biological markers (e.g. presence/absence and activity of selected microbes) to predict crop success.
This webinar will detail previous attempts to predict crop yields from compost quality indexes, and will describe work in progress to generate functional biomarkers for rapid compost analysis in the future.