Nick Femia Mushrooms in Australia, interview SA Mushrooms Hi, my name is Nick Femia and I'm part owner of SA Mushrooms. My family and I have been here for twenty-three years. So we started this company in 1998 with two employees and now we have 120. We grow between 55 and 60 tonnes of mushrooms every week. 85% of them are the white agaricus mushrooms and 15% are of the Swiss brown variety. and we grow 52 weeks a year on 9,000 square metres of growing area. We use quite a heavy blend of Kekkilä-BVB casing soil here in Australia. Compost and casing peat moss is two of the most important ingredients in growing mushrooms and without a good peat moss we just can't get the nice solid heavy mushrooms that our market requires and this product ensures that we achieve this. BVB casing soil supplies a the mushroom with a lot of the mushroom with a lot of the mushrooms with a lot of nutrients and water. And the mushroom is 92% water. So it plays an extremely important part. The Kekkilä-BVB products have helped us because they are very consistent in their production. They're very consistent in their quality which ensures us completely consistent and a great quality of mushroom all year round for our customers. We've been a Kekkilä-BVB customer for some twenty odd years. The things that we appreciate most about our business relationship is the open and honest way is the open and honest way that we can talk and overcome any obstacles that we may have. Again to ensure our customers all year round fresh mushrooms. Also having a local Australian agent which has never let us down once in twenty three years plays a big part of that. The support and the backup service we get from Kekkilä-BVB and their local agent is second to none. The core values that drive our operation is family. We buy our farm supplies from all family businesses as we employ families. What we're most proud of here at SA Mushrooms is that we are growing one of the healthiest foods on the planet. There's no fat, there's no salt. It's packed full of vitamins and we're very proud and lucky to be in this industry. In the future for SA Mushrooms we just need to keep growing more of the great quality that we're already growing. We need to increase our production because scale of economy is very important. and just continue employing families which is the main thing. The part that Kekkilä-BVB can play in reaching our goals here at SA Mushrooms is just complete consistency of product. They are already doing that and we would love to see that continue in the future. Nick Femia Mushrooms in Australia, interview SA Mushrooms BVB Substrates At the foundation of growth