Mushroom business ready to take off amid limited demand

By Joko Sarwono

BOGOR (JP): Lost your job? How about trying your hand in a business that few people have yet ventured into -- but has good prospects? How about running a mushroom business before the business catches?

Bahrul Saefi, who lost his job as at the Pandeglang regency office at the onset of the economic crisis in mid-1997, is now undergoing training in managing a mushroom business.

Every day for the past six months, the 25-year old, and five others, have tended to some 1,500 plastic pots planted with mushrooms in the Cisaranten village. The daily turnover is between six and 14 kilograms of mushrooms.

"We're working on expanding the capacity. We hope to have 6,000 plastic pots and an output of 20 kg a day," Bahrul said.

He used to earn Rp 100,000 a month as a contract worker at the Pandeglang administration, and his parents also provided financial support for him to survive.

Now as a trainee in this mushroom center, he is paid a sack of rice, enough to last him a month, and Rp 50,000. Plus he is entitled to a share of the retained income the center makes from selling the mushrooms.

Nearing the completion of his training, Bahrul is looking forward to opening a branch in the nearby Pandeglang regency in the next three to four months. "We've already found 20 unemployed youths ready to take part," he said.

The Cisaranten mushroom center is the brainchild of Komarudin, who provided the knowledge and training to tend mushroom plants. It is one of four centers that he helped set up around Bogor.

The 43-year old Komarudin gave up his job at an air- conditioner company in Jakarta and moved to Bogor to try his hand in various small agribusiness enterprises.

He tried the fishery business at first, before learning about the mushroom culture at the Agriculture Guidance Academy here in 1996.

It took him a while and dozens of failed experiments before he eventually got the hang of breeding mushrooms at his home.

"My success rate was initially 20 percent, but then I worked my way up to 40, 50, and 80 percent. Today, out of 1,000 plastic pots of mushrooms I breed, only up to five fail," he said.

"You just need to be thorough in this business," he said.

What does it take to start a mushroom business? You need a reasonably spacious garden behind your home. "I started with Rp 170,000 working capital in 1996. I guess you need Rp 500,000 today to start one."

He estimated that the cost of a plastic pot of mushrooms is Rp 830 and the return in less than two months, is Rp 1,800.

Komarudin, a high school drop out, is rarely at home now because the Bogor city administration has asked him to organize training and workshop programs about mushroom culture.

While starting a mushroom business may be as easy as growing it, marketing the product may prove tricky. There is simply limited demand.

Mushrooms are currently consumed mostly by poor rural people.

Wealthy urban Indonesians are not too crazy about mushrooms and negative media publicity about people poisoned after consuming mushrooms was no help, Komarudin said.

The poisonous mushrooms are the ones grown in the wild but the ones grown in breeding centers are guaranteed because they have been sterilized, he said during a tour of the mushroom center.

To help the marketing of mushrooms among the urban elite, Komarudin and his colleagues in 1996 established Supa Fajar Mas cooperative.

Endhi Pujosanyoto, an agriculture technology graduate who manages the cooperative, admits that mushrooms are a hard sell, with supermarkets taking only two kgs of the 25 kg it sells every day. The rest is sold in traditional markets at far lower prices.

But Endhi is not giving up hope, knowing that it won't be long before the urban Indonesian elite catch on to the mushroom diet. "It's one of those things, once you taste it, you go crazy about it."