Approaches and challenges for a sustainable low-carbon mushroom industry

Sustainable agriculture holds a key role in attaining a balanced approach to increase productivity, especially for growing industries like mushroom production. Producers like China, the USA, and the UK lead the race for global mushroom production, while India lags with 0.18 million tonnes of output. However, ensuring the sustainability of the mushroom industry is needed for environmental conservation, long-term economic viability, and the overall well-being of communities dependent on this agricultural sector. This review focuses on the recent trends in waste and carbon footprint generation from the mushroom industry, emphasizing spent mushroom substrate and utilities like electricity. Moreover, this review extensively covers recent advancements in research concerning incorporating innovative technologies such as AI and precision agricultural technologies like Internet-of-Things (IoT) and big data and contemporary approaches, such as solar energy in mushroom farming. The challenges the mushroom industry faces, and policies to tackle them and promote sustainable agriculture are also thoroughly explored. The review concludes that the carbon footprint generation and waste release from mushroom production can be mitigated using AI, IoT, big data, machine learning, integrated sensors, etc., by increasing production efficiency and optimizing processes. Conventions such as circular economy, conventional energy substitution, carbon credit, and carbon capturing can also alleviate carbon emissions and carbon footprint. Therefore, this will allow the mushroom industry to align with Sustainable Development Goals 7 (affordable and clean energy) and 13 (climate action). Moreover, there is an urgent need to refine the schemes and provisions to make mushroom cultivation a sustainable agricultural sector.