Whats killing the mushrooms of Pennsylvania?
Most farmers, that is. If there’s one thing a farmer of mushrooms fears, it’s seeing the color green in his or her crop beds. Mushrooms are fungi and lack chlorophyll. Instead of relying on the sun and photosynthesis, they draw their nutrients from the ground and their growing medium. Healthy colors for the most popular commercially grown mushrooms in the United States are white, brown, and beige. Green spells disease. For mycologists with the Agricultural Research Service’s Systematic Botany and Mycology Laboratory (SBML) in Beltsville, Maryland, green also spelled a challenge not long ago. In the early to mid-1990s, mushroom farmers in Pennsylvania were under siege. Commercial production of their crop was being seriously affected by a green mold epidemic. According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, Pennsylvania farmers grow more mushrooms than farmers in any other state, and in 1995 the farmers in Chester County–the state’s mushroom mecca–experienced crop losses of 3
