Suomen Pakuri company offers forest owners a service for the cultivation of chaga mushroom (Inonotus obliquus). Chaga mushroom contains health enhancing ingredients. You can prepare it as tea or extract it with alcohol.
Chaga mushroom is a traditional raw material in Chinese and Russian traditional medicine. In Russia chaga mushroom has been used for treating stomach and lung cancer. Reserarchers have observed that the ingredients in chaga mushroom have destroyed influenza viruses and various cancer cells.
Chaga mushroom creates a black burl on a living tree. The burl emits spores only after the tree is dead, which is why the cultivation does not spread the mushroom to other trees. The trees used for cultivation can be felled – or they must be felled due to the danger of spreading to living trees – afterwards and used to produce chips, fuelwood or pulp wood.
Suomen Pakuri offers forest owners full service chaga mushroom growing. The company plants the mushroom on the tree and buys and collects the burls. It takes 5–6 years to grow the burl after planting. The price of the burl is EUR 33—50 per kilo.
Suomen Pakuri grows the mycelium needed to plant the mushroom in house. The company business is based on research carried out by the University of Eastern Finland and Natural Resources Institute Finland.