Man harvests the magic of mushroom farming as second income

Compiled by LIEW JIA XIAN and BENJAMIN LEE

WHILE many people see mushrooms as just food, Hasrulizad Hasmuti saw them as an opportunity for a secondary source of income.

The farm foreman at Felda Tenggaroh 5 in Johor said he had always been interested in growing mushrooms, so he started doing it at the site of a former petrol station in his village during his free time.

He invested RM400 and scored double returns of RM800.

“After I saw the amount I earned from the first batch, I bought more blocks so that I could grow more mushrooms, and now I can earn up to RM7,000 a month from the business,” the 42-year-old told Utusan Malaysia.

The father of four also said it was easy to grow and harvest mushrooms compared with other corps.

“When I come back from work, I would stop by the mushroom farm to tend to it for a while.

“It is really simple. I do not need to use any pesticides or buy big farming tools or equipment.

“The only tricky part is keeping the temperature consistently cold to ensure the best quality,” he added.

Hasrulizad said he was now using his knowledge and experience to help others in his area and hoped that more people would become mushroom entrepreneurs like him.

> The daily also reported that Datuk Norman Abdul Halim, the chief executive of KRU Entertainment, has urged the National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (Finas) to encourage local producers to release more high-quality films.

“As a viewer, I think Finas has to be more thorough in its quality control to prevent low-quality films from being released to the big screen,” the founder of KRU Studios said. He also encouraged newcomers to the industry to use easy-to-access platforms like YouTube for their initial projects.

● The above article is compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with this ' >'sign, it denotes a separate news item.