Producing nutritious food at a profit, while using materials that would otherwise be considered waste, constitutes a valuable service in the self-sustaining community we might envision for the future. Mushrooms require different kinds of environment at different stages of their growth. The required environment naturally varies for each type of mushroom. The absence of proper environment might cause diseases and/or reduce the quality and quantity of the produce. To increase the production of mushrooms, monitoring and controlling of environmental parameters is a must. As object-oriented design and programming provide a number of features, such as abstraction and inheritance, that help in easy development and implementation of applications, a system has been designed and implemented using these techniques to monitor environmental parameters like temperature, Relative Humidity (RH), etc.

Most farmers are not getting good returns from agriculture at many places as the landholdings are small; and the farmers too are small or marginal farmers and agricultural laborers. They want to adopt other agriculture related activities to enhance their income, and adoption of mushroom cultivation provides an opportunity to supplement their income.

Mushroom cultivation requires no land and can be grown in houses/small huts. Mushroom cultivation is taken up during the period of the year when generally the farmers have less fieldwork. The crops that have short crop duration and no marketing problems are generally picked up.

However, the farmers were growing mushrooms in an unorganized way and were not getting good returns. The extension agencies/field functionaries were also facing a problem in disseminating the latest technology to them. Moreover, some of the mushroom growers were not getting technical guidance. Congenial agro-climatic conditions for mushroom cultivation and profitable marketing avenues for the produce are necessary.

Most available markets require more mushrooms than what occasional fruiting provides. Indoor production can fill the gap when outside fruiting production lags, as the entire operation can also be conducted indoors. However, indoor mushroom production demands a much higher level of knowledge, continuous monitoring and timely manipulation of environmental conditions.

Computer Sciences Journal, Object-Oriented Designing, Mushroom Cultivation, Object-oriented Programming, OOP, PC-based System, Electronic Monitoring, Relative Humidity, Object-oriented Framework, Industrial Automation Systems, Decision-making Process, Unified Modeling Language, UML, Open Object-Oriented Knowledge Economy in Intelligent Industrial Automation, OOONEIDA.