Guxian Button Mushrooms

Guxian Button Mushrooms

　　Guxian Button Mushrooms

　　Button mushrooms, also known as white mushrooms or table mushrooms, are a type of saprophytic fungus that thrives in medium to low temperatures. Originating in France, they later spread to Europe and America and are internationally recognized as a health food. They are currently the most widely consumed, in-demand edible fungi in the world, serving as food, supplement, and medicine. The fruiting bodies of button mushrooms contain trypsin, maltase, and protease, and the tyrosinase they contain has blood pressure-lowering effects. Taiwanese scholars have extracted an anti-cancer heteroprotein from the fruiting bodies of button mushrooms.

　　Guxian is the first county in Shanxi Province to develop button mushrooms on a large scale. The mushrooms produced there are tender in texture, high in quality, pollution-free, and harmless. Currently, the county has developed 5,000 sheds covering 1 million square meters of button mushroom cultivation, generating an output value of 30 million yuan. This has increased the average income of mushroom farmers by 800 yuan, making it the largest button mushroom production base in the province. In 2004, in collaboration with Taigu Tianshan Dou Company, an investment of 18 million yuan was made to build two button mushroom freeze-drying production lines, capable of processing 8,000 tons of agricultural and sideline products such as button mushrooms per year. The products are exported to countries including Japan and those in Europe and America. The waste residue from button mushroom production is further processed into organic fertilizer and returned to the fields to enhance soil fertility, forming a small agricultural production cycle of “growing grain – raising livestock – cultivating mushrooms – producing fertilizer.” This not only reduces environmental pollution caused by straw burning but also improves the overall agricultural production efficiency.