When NIQASH came to visit the mushroom project in Mosul, Sallal lectured this correspondent on the intricacies of growing mushrooms as though he were a university professor. “Growing mushrooms requires pasteurization and sterilization to get rid of harmful bacteria,” he explained. “This was done here,” he said, indicating a small chamber containing steam machines, which are needed for the pasteurization of mushroom compost. “These machines were made in Mosul,” Sallal says, “because importing them would have been too expensive. And they work perfectly.”
To successfully plant, grow and harvest the mushrooms, conditions need to be optimal – and this includes heat and high humidity, with just the right levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Various machines create these conditions in a room with specially built walls that will ensure best conditions for baby mushrooms can be maintained. Today, in the terraces that have been built throughout the space, one can already see the white sprouts coming up.
“The most difficult part is preparing the seeds,” Sallal explained. “And that happened in a laboratory. But there’s no room for mistakes at any stage because all the stages complement one another.”
What is particularly interesting about Sallal’s mushroom project is that it is almost completely local: the only stage at which foreigners intervene is in the preparation of the seeds.
Nonetheless, Sallal said the project had still been an expensive one. He was reluctant to talk about the real costs of the project. Although he had used his own money to set the mushroom project up, he had also been able to get a loan from the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture. “It is too costly,” Sallal complained, “but at the same time, it is also profitable.”
The state of Ninawa is well known for its agriculture and is Iraq’s leading wheat and barley producing region, responsible, on average, for around 20 per cent of the country’s total wheat production and around 30 per cent of its total barley crop. But mushroom farming is something new to Ninawa and it may well be an interesting, potentially lucrative, alternative for grain farmers in the area heavily hit by successive droughts and unsteady government support over the past few years.
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