AMRITSAR: It was in 1989 that 66-year-old Harjinder Kaur Randhawa started growing mushrooms as a hobby in her courtyard, in Dhardeo village of Amritsar district, to boost her family income. After 30 years of thumping success, three of her sons have successfully built a niche brand synonymous with premium mushroom varieties and processed foods .
Her son Mandeep Singh who is now 41 and his brothers grow as many as 12 varieties of mushroom, including button mushrooms, oyster mushrooms and milky mushrooms, at the Randhawa Mushroom Farm on the Batala-Jalandhar Highway in Dhardeo. He got his advanced training at the Directorate of Mushroom Research in Solan, Himachal Pradesh.
Their mushroom farm is completely air-conditioned so that they can produce throughout the year and they have also opened a new wholesale unit with special cooling equipment for storage of up to 8,000 kg or their produce. They have also a busy retail outlet nearby.
“Be it growing mushrooms or selling them, the role of each brother is different. My elder brother, Manjeet Singh, handles primary production duties, while my younger brother, Harpreet Singh, handles spawn-production and processing. I oversee operations concerning marketing, banking, and media. Our mother supervises the workers on the farm. Another of our brothers is based in Australia and grows sugarcane and bananas, but he, too, lends us a helping hand whenever he’s here,” Mandeep was quoted by an Indian magazine “The Better India.”
“After installing an AC plant, now we produce mushrooms round the year. Mushrooms are a perishable commodity and we can’t store these for long. So, a cold storage has also been prepared. When we don’t get a good price in the market, we process it. Mushroom pickles are so much in demand that we are unable to meet it at times,” Mandeep was quoted by Tribune India newspaper.
He was also quoted as saying that andhawa Mushroom Farm had a hundred employees, of which 98 per cent were women.
“Currently, we have around 60 workers, of which only four are men. This is because cultivation of mushrooms can be very challenging and the smallest details require special attention. We believe that no one can do this work better than women and that’s why they’re given priority in hiring decisions,” he told Better India..
Randhawa and her accomplishments were also high by the Commonwealth Chamber of Commerce, Twhich aims to cultivate networking, advocacy, connectivity and partnerships by supporting individuals, small and large businesses in developing intra-Commonwealth connections to build the foundations for life-long business partnerships.