Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Mushrooms
The little town of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, hardly seems like an agricultural hotspot.
In fact, the rolling hills around Kennett Square are not covered by farm fields at all. Tucked
away in the southeastern corner of the state, near Maryland and Delaware, it is primarily
known for its quaint architecture and as the hometown of Herb Pennock, an early baseball
star who was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1948. Even so, farming
is an important part of the local economy, but here in Kennett Square, all of the farming is
done indoors. This town of 5,300 calls itself the Mushroom Capital of the World, producing
more than half of all the domesticated fungi grown in this country.
The rise of Kennett Square as the mushroom capital was hardly inevitable. Cultivated
mushrooms, after all, require no special soil or climate that would dictate one growing area
over another. Rather, the town's ascension was due to a timely combination of happenstance
and economic logic. The mushroom industry here dates to the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury, when Kennett Square was already well established as a center for growing hothouse
flowers for the floral trade (particularly carnations).
Kennett Square's mushroom heritage got its start when a Quaker farmer named William
Swayne figured he could stack a second crop in his greenhouse and grow mushrooms in the
damp, dark area underneath his flower benches. This would have been nothing more than
a happy bit of trivia if it hadn't been for the town's central location, convenient to the ma-
jor markets of Phila delphia, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and New
York. These cities provided the kind of educated, ethnically diverse consumers who would
eat mushrooms, which at that time were not a popular item. Just as important, these cities
were rich in the stuff that was necessary for mushrooms to grow - mainly horse manure,
hay and straw. Trains bound for the big cities would roll out of Kennett Square loaded with
mushrooms and return loaded with the collected detritus of those urban areas. By 1924,
85 percent of the mushrooms in the United States were grown in Pennsylvania, and by far
most of them were grown in the Kennett Square area. Much has changed in the mushroom
industry since then - notably, it is much less dependent on horses - but Kennett Square is
still the center of mushroom propagation.
Dozens of varieties of mushrooms are commercially cultivated around the world, but
more than 90 percent of those grown in the United States belong to one species - Agaricus
