Inside Kennet Square, Pennsylvania

Lessons from the world’s mushroom capital: On tour with Umberto Calvo

Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, is one of the world’s most established mushroom-growing regions and home to a diverse concentration of farms and production systems. 

During a recent visit to the US to attend the Mushroom Growers' Short Course, Umberto Calvo (AHR) joined a tour of several farms in the Kennett Square region — an opportunity to see firsthand how producers are responding to the ever-evolving challenges of scale, labour, pest pressure, mechanisation, and consistency. 

The tour showcased a spectrum of systems: ultra-modern high-automation sites, refurbished legacy facilities still running traditional bucket-fill methods, and family-owned operations balancing innovation with generational knowledge. While each farm had its own formula for success, one challenge connected them all: managing flies and their impact on surrounding residential communities.