Papa Juncao turns grass into mushrooms, helping developing countries

What pops up in your mind when you see the Chinese word Juncao?

Probably nothing too much apart from it looks exotic perhaps.

However, for many poor farmers in Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Lesotho and Rwanda, it means the magic technology that enables nutritious and delicious mushrooms to grow from chopped grass bringing the locals cash and dignity.

They even call their babies Juncao.

“I insisted on giving it a Chinese name at the first International Symposium on Juncao Industry Development,”recalled Professor Lin Zhanxi, 67, inventor of the plant.

The symposium was held 14 years ago in Fuzhou, capital city of eastern China’s Fujian province.

“Over 20 English names were suggested, such as mushroom grass and fungus grass,” said Lin, professor of Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University. “But it’s a brand new technology and deserves a brand new name. I’m glad I’ve given a new word to the English language.”

The idea for Juncao came from a hungry young Lin in the early 1970s. “People were starving in those days, even to death. But cattle rarely died of hunger. So I asked myself, why couldn’t people eat grass just like cattle?”

In 1971, Lin put forward the idea of cultivating edible fungi in chopped up wild grass for the first time.

It was not until 1983, eight years after he entered Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, that he began the arduous research following up his idea.

At the end of 1986, Lin saw the world’s first Juncao mushroom sprout from a bottle filled with chopped bird’s foot fern and other ingredients.

“I gazed at it in wonder and tears,” Lin said. “We were at the threshold of an agricultural revolution.”

Since then, Lin and his team have cultivated Juncao using 45 different kinds of wild grasses.

Mushrooms have been cultivated using logs and sawdust since

1970s, which usually means cutting down trees.

“It’s too big a price to pay,” said Lin. “The Juncao technology sets the mushroom cultivation industry on an ecology-friendly and sustainable path.”

“On the other hand, it’s easy to learn and promises quick returns on small investments. So it can be a powerful weapon for poor people to combat unemployment, poverty and malnutrition.”

According to Lin, China has 400 million hectares of grassland, three times the area of arable land. Making use of only one percent of it, China’s Juncao industry could bring about more than 90 million tonnes of fresh mushrooms worth 720 billion yuan (105.6 billion U.S. dollars) and 24 million job opportunities.

Yet Lin’s ambitions go beyond China. While endeavoring to spread Juncao at home, he and his team have been working hard to extend it abroad since 1995, when the first international Juncao technology training seminar was held in Fuzhou.

“It’s like an ever-growing Juncao family,” said Lin’s daughter Lin Dongmei, who resigned as a civil servant in Singapore and returned home to assist her father in 2003.

“As the Juncao family grows bigger, our common enemies—poverty and unemployment—seem smaller,” wrote Brian W. Wall from Papua New Guinea, the first country to introduce the Juncao technology as a Chinese-government-aid project.

“A young trainee from Uganda called Alex even has set up a cross-border business,” Dongmei smiled. “He rents a plot in Rwanda to grow Juncao mushrooms and sells his products back to Uganda.”

Rwanda paid 120,000 U.S. dollars to get the Juncao technology from China in 2005. Construction work on a Chinese government-aided Juncao demonstration center, at a cost of 40 million yuan, began last April and will finish this October.

Rwanda has been the second developing country in the world to buy the Juncao technology. Earlier in July, 2004, South Africa’s KuaZulu-Natal(KZN) provincial government, believing in its power to help the poor, paid 240,000 U.S. dollars for the technology.

Lin and his team flew to South Africa to help carry out the KZN project at the beginning of 2005. For years, Lin and Dongmei, father and daughter, would work together in the fields of KZN, quite a rare sight for locals.

“Whenever I called ‘Papa’, the locals would laugh, some guys even followed suit,” Lin Dongmei recalled. And soon the father of Juncao became known as Papa Juncao.

Trying hard to make it easier to grow the mushrooms, Lin simplified the method for growing them to pouring five buckets of water on the mushroom beds each day. And in a period of seven days, the farmers could gather mushrooms all year round.

However, the greater challenge lies in changing local conventions and establishing new management models.

“To our surprise,” said Lin, “farmland here is still collectively run, everyone’s eating from the same big pot’, just like China before the beginning of reform and opening up in 1978. We managed to divide the growing plot into different sections and transfer land to individuals.”

Lin has explored the flagship site model in KNZ’s Kwadindi since July 2006. The site, supported by a Juncao demonstration base and operated by a cooperative consisting of the poorest of the poor, produces raw materials, markets products and recycles.

According to Dongmei’s notes, Ms Nozipho Precious Ngcobo from Kwadindi stocked five square meters on August 11, 2007; 13 days later she collected 82.6 kilograms of fresh mushrooms.

“Generally speaking, a farmer with a 10-square-meter plot can earn 24,000 rand (3,184.5 U.S. dollars) to 32,000 rand a year, double the ordinary income of locals,” Lin said.

According to Lin Dongmei, now there are five such flagship sites in KZN. The local government plans to build 15 more, each involving an investment of about 5 million rand.

Fuzhou, Xinhua