Meet the Growers
Hideharu Takeuchi of Takeuchi Kinoko Labo
A former pro-skier who worked as a model for ski goods companies and as an instructor while skiing the pro circuit in Japan until he was in his late twenties, Hideharu Takeuchi is a stout older man of a diminutive stature that belies his incredible strength and stamina. After seeing the limits to skiing as a long-term career, Takeuchi started up an enoki mushroom (Flammulina velutipes) growing operation roughly 40 years ago, and, at 69 years old, is still working five to six days a week from morning to dusk. Takeuchi Kinoko Labo is a holdover from what most enoki production in Japan initially looked like: it is a small family-run business producing a few tons of enoki each month, without the aid of any automated machinery other than for bagging and packaging. Big enoki farms are essentially high-tech manufacturing plants (and have the price tag of one). One worker driving a specialized fork lift can move hundreds of bottles of enoki between rooms in a matter of minutes, and an intricate network of conveyor belts harvest and package the final product in a fully automated process. At Takeuchi Kinoko Labo, the two of us, Takeuchi and myself, slid 15-kilogram trays (each with 16 bottles of substrate) weighing several tons in total, onto shelves, which took around forty-five minutes of hard labor. Even as an athletic and physically strong marathoner and hiker, less than half Takeuchi’s age: I could not keep up with the efficient and graceful-yet-breathless pace with which he tossed trays into place perfectly. Whenever I pointed this out, he would laugh furtively and say, “It’s just a matter of getting used to it.” The only time I heard him admit that something was difficult, was when he was unloading 32-kilogram boxes (totaling 360 kg) of cut enoki at a food processing plant, a delivery he makes personally every single weekday, typically alone.
All told, I spent 8 days working at Takeuchi Kinoko Labo to observe up close the entire production process. Each day was a whirlwind_emdash_on my feet all day, constantly in motion, trying to do every task as fast as I could, but still left in the dust by the impossible speed and efficiency of the older pros. Harvesting a few hundred kilograms of enoki by hand is a long process, involving hours largely standing in one place, in a 5-degree Celsius room, intermittently stopping to haul out boxes of enoki to stack on a cart in the hall or to stack trays of the spent substrate bottles (which once the three stacks reached 8 trays high, had to be moved into the hall and an empty trolley pulled in). In addition, each cluster of enoki has to be removed the plastic collars they grow against and those collars are also stacked into columns. Even placing the plastic collars onto the bottles is done by hand, after pinning has begun. This is done in the coldest room, and is the most mentally tiring and monotonous of all the work at a manual enoki growing operation, as it involves moving along each shelf, rotating trays and placing collars on. At times I had to squat for 20 minutes at a time to put collars on the floor and lower level trays. I reached a point where I could complete this task at what seemed a reasonably fast and efficient speed, but my work still paled next to the 74-year-old in the neighboring row, who sounded like a machine plugging away as he pulled out the transparent blue plastic rolls of film and slid them on each bottle in mere fractions of a second.
The enoki industry in Japan is cutthroat. Prices have steadily dropped for decades, while as consumption has increased modestly. Growers find it increasingly difficult to get manual labor for such farms, even though enoki prices are almost too low to afford labor to start with. I have heard about a large enoki producer in the rural, mountainous area of western Nagano City that went out of business, because the cost of trucking its enoki 30km to wholesale buyers in the city's downtown was greater than the entire operation's profits. Nakano City, is located in northern Nagano Prefecture, on the edge of Japan’s “Snow Country” and is the leading producer of enoki in Japan despite its small size, buoyed by a good climate and a large network of local growers. Over a third of Japan's 130,000 tons of annual enoki production is grown in this city of 41,000 people. The only way the large group of small and midsize producers have survived in Nakano city is precisely because the substrate processing, the filling process, the injection of spawn, initial incubation, and fungal scraping are all contracted to one enormous central cooperative that has the automated facilities and size necessary to operate at an economy of scale.