Abstract:

This research is about the adoption of mushroom farming as a source of income generation by smallholder farmers in Zambia. Mushroom farming business specialize in growing mushrooms. These mushrooms are used by customers for either medicinal or culinary purposes, depending on the type of mushroom grown. Additionally, they may be sold wholesale to clients or at retail prices. A mushroom farm business’ ideal customer is a restaurant that focuses on using locally sourced ingredients. Restaurants and Hotels will have regular orders that provide stable income. Through the literature review and the study, it was found that the mushroom production is profitable because it has a huge market within Zambia and also that it is climate independent and it doesn’t require a large land for production. To accomplish the objective of the research the following research questions were formulated: What is the farmers’ knowledge on mushroom farming? What is the willingness of farmers to do mushroom farming? To answer these questions three focus groups and three interviews were undertaken. The focus groups consisted of producers, traders and established company doing mushroom production. Based on these results the research concluded that there are knowledge gaps among the Mushroom farmers especially on Marketing and Processing skills. It was also evident that there are very few established companies in Mushroom production and have monopolized the production of mushroom. There is a lot of potential yet for mushroom farming locally since there’s such a large amount of organic waste products to contend with.

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