The Mushroom Capital of the United States

Kennett Square, Pennsylvania:

The countryside around Kennett Square in Pennsylvania’s semi-rural Chester County is well-known for its thoroughbred horse farms, its rambling estates where scions of industry and retail still ride to the hounds and its fresh-vegetable producers who supply local farm-to-table restaurants in Philadelphia and Wilmington, just across the state line in Delaware.
But a grittier agricultural industry dominates the region: mushrooms. Kennett Square is king of fresh, commercially-grown mushrooms. Not only is mushroom farming the leading agricultural pursuit in Chester County, the area is also the largest producer of fresh mushrooms in the United States.
Chester County’s 61 mushroom farms account for 47 percent of total U.S. mushroom production, according to Pennsylvania’s Agricultural Development Council. This means over 400 million pounds of mushrooms valued at $365 million, with an overall contribution to the local economy of an estimated $2.7 billion. The industry directly employs almost 10,000 workers, mostly from the area’s large Hispanic community.
The landscape surrounding the region is dotted with single-level cinderblock buildings — variously called mushroom “barns,” “houses” and “doubles” — where the mushrooms are grown. The roads themselves hold a vehicular menagerie — flatbed trucks carrying baled hay for compost coming from as far away as the Midwest, dump trucks carting steaming compost to and from the barns and, of course, panel-bodied trucks racing to deliver just-picked mushrooms to nearby processing facilities. And when all that compost is being turned and is particularly ripe, winds carry that particular, rank aroma that says, “You’re in mushroom country.”
The bulk of the mushrooms produced in the area are in the Agaricus family – the ubiquitous white and brown buttons plus the large portobellos that have become popular grilled-steak substitutes of late. The region also produces what are called “specialties” or “exotics” – shiitakes, oysters, maitakes, beeches, enokis and pom poms. (Unfortunately, wild porcinis and morels have never been tamed.)

It surprises me that nobody has been able to domesticate morel mushrooms.  They are selling in the local grocery for $50 a pound.  Every time I think of mushroom farms I think of Travis Tritt's song, "Lord Have Mercy On the Working Man."