New Income Generating Project
One of our main goals in Young Lives is to help our students get a job or start a livelihood.
Aside from providing skills and developing their character, we also teach them how to do Income generating projects.
This is why we start to develop a new IGP.
Spearheaded by Terry, we started mushroom farming for 3 reasons. It will:
1. be part of the students’ IGP (Income generating project) module in Young Lives,
2. provide food for our community thus saving some money.
3. be a source of income to support the project expenses.
According to experts, around 70,000 do mushroom farming business in Myanmar.
Many do it because resources (such as coconut shells, banana trees, straw, and cow dung) are abundant especially in rural areas with warm weather (34-38 °C).
Martin, the leader of Green Pastures (an agriculture-based community-building project by Fondacio), taught us the techniques to grow straw mushrooms.
Instead of growing them on the ground, we decided to build a house for our mushroom farming.
Despite spending more, it makes growing mushrooms easier as it provides good ventilation and protection from the rain. It also takes less space as it can be built vertically using shelves.
Below is the Mushroom house plan.
Good for Health and Environment
Since we don’t use chemicals, our mushrooms are deliciously good for the consumers’ health.
This also makes the remains from the mushroom farm (such as cow dung, water hyacinth, and hard paper) easily disintegrated.
It can then be reused as organic fertilizer for other vegetables.
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How do we sell it?
The mushroom typically takes 9 – 10 days before it is ready for harvest. It will be collected using mushroom bags. The mushroom will continue to sprout 8 days after the first collection.
Our team will then do door-to-door retail or sell it to different restaurants.
The remains will gradually dry after the 8th harvest. We will then have to replace it with fresh materials.
Unfortunately, due to the rising cases of COVID-19 in Myanmar, the resources are not available.
The demand gets lower because restaurants and bars are closed. We are also not allowed to do house-to-house selling.
Let’s continue to pray that the world will soon be free from the COVID-19 so we can resume our mushroom farming for the benefit of our project and our students.
Learning from this pandemic, let’s start making Healthier and greener life choices!
by Terry
Young Lives Yangon Staff