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Abstract: The chemical changes which compost undergoes during its preparation are manifestly complex, but before mushroom growing can be transformed from an empirical procedure into a state of technology comparable to much of modern agriculture, these changes will need to be elucidated. By far, the greatest complexities exist in the realm of the organic constituents. The nature of the major carbonaceous nutrients for the mushroom under commercial conditions of cultivation have been considered to be carbohydrate in nature (Styer 12, 13), lignin and proteins (Waksman and Nissen, 16), and carmehzation products of carbohydrates (Sinden and Häuser, 8). The difficulties involved in establishing the validity of these diverse opinions, which may not be mutually exclusive, while great, are not insurmountable with modern analytical procedures. Stoller (11), has pointed out that yields of mushrooms can be substantially influenced by simple chemical entities such as nitrogen, phosphorus and the major cations. The use of Kjeldahl-nitrogen determinations is widespread in the mushroom industry and it is commonly believed that mushroom yields are related to this quantity. Quantitative data on nitrogen, phosphorus and various cations have been presented by Burrows (1, 2), Burrows and Flegg (3), Flegg (4, 5), Stoller (10) and others, but published studies of other than brief reports have been virtually nonexistent for about a decade. Even pure culture studies of mycelial growth have led various investigators, e.g., Treschow (14) and Humfeld and Sugihara (6) to different conclusions on the osmotic strengths of solutions tolerable by mushroom mycelium and on the relative importance of potassium and calcium for mycelial growth. In order to gain further insight into the levels and possible roles of some of the inorganic elements under conditions of commercial mushroom cultivation, two chemical investigations were undertaken: (1) a study of the changes in several chemical elements in a commercial compost pile during composting and subsequent cropping, and (2) an attempt to ascertain the levels to these chemical elements at spawning time and their favorable or unfavorable influence on crop yield.
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