Welcome to PA’s ‘mushroom mecca’: Thousands celebrate fungi farming at annual festival

Gale Ferranto doesn’t hesitate when asked what her favorite mushroom is: baby bellas, she says.

“I love to stir-fry them. I love to stuff them,” Ferranto said. “Portobello stuffed mushrooms are really good. Every party I’m invited to, I’m bringing stuffed mushrooms.”

A third-generation mushroom farmer born and raised in Kennett Square, Ferranto can easily wax poetic about fungi: how they grow from spores, away from the light. How Quaker florists likely began the mushroom farming industry in Pennsylvania, and how Italian immigrants like her family then took the reins. And how now farmers from Latin America are leading much of the local mushroom farming.

She told this story as thousands of people streamed into the 39th annual Mushroom Festival, held Sept. 7 and 8 in Chester County’s Kennett Square. The festival, started nearly four decades ago by her family and other local mushroom farmers, is an ode to the industry that’s led to the area being deemed a “mushroom mecca,” as Ferranto calls it.

Kennett Square, a borough of about 6,000 people tucked into the rural farmland of southeastern Pennsylvania, is often referred to as the mushroom capital of the world because of the sheer quantity of fungi it churns out every year. Pennsylvania dominates the country’s mushroom industry, producing about 465 million pounds of mushrooms in 2023. The commonwealth accounted for 69% of the nation’s mushroom sales in the 2023-24 growing season; California, the second-largest mushroom producer, had 11%. Chester County produced about 199 million pounds of mushrooms in the 2023-24 growing season.

“We produce more mushrooms per capita than anywhere else,” Charles Stinson, a third-generation mushroom farmer from Kennett Square, said in between talking to festivalgoers about the display of mushrooms before him. “There’s a lot of pride behind that, a lot of hard work.”

There are about 52 mushroom farms in Chester County, Ferranto said, and many of the farms’ owners and employees volunteer their time to operate the festival, which attracts about 25,000 people each year and raises money for local nonprofits. This past year, Ferranto said, the festival organizers provided about $110,000 to local groups working to benefit older people, alleviate hunger, aid animals, and more.

With the 2024 theme “Spawning Future Growth,” the event is a whirlwind of cooking competitions, mushroom-themed art, mushroom dishes from local restaurants, and, perhaps most important to the organizers, local farmers educating the public on the importance of the mushrooms they tend to year-round. Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office noted in a November 2023 press release that Pennsylvania’s mushroom industry pumps about $1.2 billion into the state’s economy each year and supports more than 9,300 jobs. The mushrooms grown in Pennsylvania include lion’s mane, shiitake, cremini — otherwise known as baby bella — oyster, maitake, king trumpet, yellow, white, and brown.

“It’s hard work,” said Ferranto, who’s also the president of Buona Foods, a mushroom farming company launched by Ferranto’s grandfather. “It’s like tending to cattle. Mushroom farmers and cow farmers are very similar to one another. They have to tend to their cattle. These mushrooms don’t have a heartbeat, but I can assure you these mushroom farmers, they have a heartbeat, and those mushrooms are really important to them.”

For Ferranto, mushrooms are synonymous with family. Her grandfather left Italy for Pennsylvania in the 1920s and soon began working as a mushroom farmer. Eventually, he acquired his own farm, beginning the story of Ferranto’s company.

That story, one of a person leaving a homeland and arriving to work in the mushroom industry in Pennsylvania, continues to be told in the commonwealth, farmers at the festival said. 

“Now we have a lot of Latin Americans that work to the farms, now have their own farm, same as my grandfather’s story,” Ferranto said. “So we’re really sensitive to immigration issues here because a lot of the workforce is Latino. Half of the high school is Latino.”

Juan Guzman moved from Mexico to Pennsylvania when he was 17 years old and almost immediately began working in the mushroom industry.

“I think I harvested mushrooms for two years, and after that there was a chance to learn how to grow the mushrooms,” Guzman, who’s now a supervisor at Needham’s Mushroom Farms in Chester County, said after fielding questions about mushroom farming from festival attendees.

It’s this blending of cultures, this introduction of people from around the globe, that makes mushroom farming in Chester County so fascinating, many festival attendees said. The stories behind these mushroom farms are ones of family, of the courage it takes to start over, of hope for a different life.

Even those whose families have been in mushroom farming for generations have stories of leaving and transformation. Ferranto, for example, left the world of fungi to make children’s clothing for 17 years before returning to her family’s business in 2007.

Stinson, too, has a story of evolution. After graduating from Penn State with a degree in agriculture in 2020, he left his family business and went to produce compost for mushroom farming. Eventually, he ended up in the place he is now: working with specialty mushrooms, like lion’s mane and maitake, at South Mill Champs, a mushroom farm in Kennett Square.

This work is different from the family farm he grew up on, but, like his childhood, Stinson’s adulthood revolves around mushrooms. And that’s no surprise for someone who always knew he wanted to be a mushroom farmer.

“In my fifth grade yearbook, under future career it says mushroom farmer,” Stinson said. “It was something I was always very interested in, intrigued with and passionate about.”