Running a modern mushroom farm is not only about maximizing yields and harvesting efficiency—it’s above all about maintaining hygiene. Cleanliness is essential both for ensuring product quality and for complying with sanitary regulations. It’s important to remember that every piece of equipment, including mushroom harvest lorries, has a direct impact on food safety.
How to Clean Mushroom Harvest Lorries?
Contaminated equipment poses a serious risk of spreading fungal diseases and can become a source of infections and harmful microorganisms. Regular and proper cleaning of harvest lorries is not just an obligation—it’s an investment in a healthy crop and the satisfaction of your end customers.
We encourage you to watch the latest video from GrowTime, where we show step by step how to clean mushroom harvest lorries effectively and safely. It’s a practical guide worth incorporating into the daily routine of every mushroom farm.
Watch the video and take care of cleanliness on your farm—because hygiene starts with the details:
Can sensors, drives and lighting survive a grow-room wash-down?
A grow room runs at near 100% humidity and carries a constant load of organic dust — conditions that destroy ordinary electronics and turn every rough surface into shelter for pathogens. Equipment that cannot be cleaned stops being a tool and becomes the thing that carries disease from one flush to the next.
GrowTime hardware is designed around that reality. Sensors and electronic components sit in high-IP enclosures, sealed against moisture and dust, so they keep working in the damp microclimate directly over the beds. Camera mounts and sensor housings are made from non-corrosive materials — the same logic behind our aluminium shelving, which does not rust or degrade in a cellar environment. Frames use smooth, anodised aluminium and streamlined shapes, which removes the dead zones where organic matter accumulates and lets your crew wipe or spray the equipment down between crops. Those surfaces also tolerate the common agricultural disinfectants you already apply to the racking. Optical systems such as MycoSense Spotlight need one extra step and nothing more: a wipe of the protective lens with a soft microfibre cloth and a mild sanitiser, with no disassembly.
Two design decisions matter most when a room goes into deep cleaning. The electric drives are disconnectable, so the sensitive units and batteries leave the room before any high-pressure wash or steam cycle. And the NEWTON picking lorry and PASCAL picking trolley roll out of the aisle entirely, so shelving and floors can be sanitised with nothing in the way.
Insect light traps (GT-I-DEAL, GT-PR and GT-DEAL series) belong to the same chain: catching pests before they reach the beds lowers the biological load everything else on the farm has to cope with.
How do you disinfect a picking lorry without damaging its electrical components?
Cleaning a picking lorry is not the same as cleaning a shovel. Once electric drives, hydraulic systems and MycoSense lighting are on board, the “power-wash everything” habit becomes the fastest route to a dead unit. Work in three stages instead.
Start dry. Remove substrate remnants and mushroom stumps with a soft brush or compressed air before any liquid touches the machine. Organic debris neutralises your disinfectant and traps moisture against electrical housings, so skipping this stage quietly undermines everything that follows.
Then wash the mechanical parts under control. The frame of the PASCAL picking trolley and the heavy-duty chassis of the NEWTON picking lorry take standard cleaning agents applied with a damp cloth or a low-pressure spray. Give the wheels and every part that contacts the shelving rails extra attention — those are the primary vectors carrying contamination between rooms.
Finally, sanitise the sensitive zones by hand. Wipe, don’t soak: control joysticks, battery housings and MycoSense light units want a cloth dampened with a professional disinfectant, and a product that is safe for plastics and rubber seals rather than an aggressive acid that degrades gaskets over time. GrowTime electrical components sit in sealed enclosures, but a sealed enclosure is not a licence to aim a pressure jet at seal points, cable entries or control panels — high pressure forces water past gaskets that stay watertight under normal conditions. If you fog the room, ventilate it properly afterwards so condensation does not sit inside the units.
One habit is worth enforcing on every shift: keep the protective caps on the charging ports while cleaning, and never connect a charger to a damp port. Let the electric drive air-dry completely first.
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