America’s growing appetite for nutritious food has fostered a hankering for a particularly delicious ingredient, and it looks to Chester County to serve up that buffet of fresh mushrooms.

While the country holds its collective breath for a taste of locally grown mushrooms, rural Kennett Square holds its breath too — mostly to avoid the smell that goes hand in hand with the production of mushrooms.

“When all that compost is being turned and is particularly ripe, winds carry that particular, rank aroma that says, ‘You’re in mushroom country,’” Modern Farmer stated in a recent feature on Chester County’s 61 mushrooms farms.

But it’s worth it. Mushroom farms employ 10,000 workers directly and sprout $2.7 billion worth of economic activity.

And while many operations are legacy endeavors now into their third and fourth generations, a lot has changed over the decades.

“We used to only harvest three crops a year” Basciani Mushrooms’ Fred Recchiuti said in the article. “We shut down for most of the summer, and the people around here rented three blocks of beach at Wildwood, New Jersey.”

Today’s mushroom farm is at it 24 hours a day and seven days a week without even a day off all year, and it expects to harvest four to six crops.

The only down time is the roughly 10 weeks between sowing spores in nitrogen-infused compost, peat moss, limestone and water and hand picking.

“‘Within about 30 minutes of arrival, the mushrooms are cooled to 34 degrees,’ explains Phillips Mushroom Farms General Manager Jim Angelucci, and by that evening they are cleaned, packaged and on their way in refrigerated trucks to markets across the country.

Read much more about the fertile Chester County ground that produces 47 percent of all U.S. mushrooms in Modern Farmer here, and check out previous VISTA Today coverage of the county’s lucrative ag scene here.