The Rural Development Administration announced on the 16th that it has developed a technology to recycle branches discarded after pruning in apple and pear orchards into mushroom bed materials. The main ingredients for mushroom bed, corn cobs and beet by-products, are mostly dependent on imports, which burdens farm management depending on the supply and demand situation. To improve this, the Rural Development Administration focused on fruit tree branches among agricultural by-products and analyzed the carbon and nitrogen ratio in organic matter, which is one of the important indicators for mushroom growth. Research results showed that the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of fruit tree branches was in the range of 60 to 70, showing similar characteristics to corn cobs. Based on this, when corn cobs were completely replaced with apple branches in the existing oyster mushroom bed (35% corn cobs, 33% rice bran), the mushroom yield per bottle increased by 8.6%, and when replaced with pear branches, it increased by 9.4%. The biological efficiency, which means how many mushrooms are produced compared to the input bed, was also 5.4 to 7.9 percentage points higher with fruit tree beds than with existing beds. Researchers analyzed that replacing corn cobs with fruit tree branches would generate about 2 million won in profit per 2-ton bag. No Hyeong-jun, head of the Mushroom Division at the National Institute of Horticultural and Herbal Science, said, "This technology is significant as it utilizes discarded agricultural by-products as a circular resource, reducing waste in agricultural fields and practicing carbon reduction," and added, "We plan to spread this technology by connecting mushroom farmers and nearby fruit tree farmers into a regional resource circular mushroom cultivation model."