Though its leading agricultural product has local roots more than a century deep, Kennett Square is experiencing a modern mushroom boom.

“Mushrooms are high in nutrition and have less calories and fat than meats,” Mushroom Council marketing leader Kathleen Preis told Modern Farmer in a recent feature story.

And despite challenges in finding labor, streamlining mechanical harvesting and overcoming public objections to the industry’s potent odors, water usage and compost disposal methods, the production within Chester County accounts for just shy of half the nation’s fresh mushroom market.

The effort is a 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year endeavor undertaken by nearly 10,000 mostly-Hispanic employees at 61 mushroom farms that annually yield a crop of 400 million pounds of commercial mushrooms worth $365 million — and that sinks a stunning total of $2.7 billion into the local economy.

“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 feature article explained.

“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.’”

Read much more about the varieties of mushrooms produced, the growing process and the industry’s local origins in Modern Farmer, here.