“In a small section of Pennsylvania, indoor farms are producing more than a million pounds of mushrooms every day...the industry generates hundreds of millions of dollars in sales each year for Chester County, which has also held a yearly mushroom festival for more than 30 years. The area’s commercial mushroom farms grow them indoors, which allows them to carefully control the environment and maximize production...
We’re the top producer in part because we have the lowest cost. But there’s a limit to how much more of the market we can take that way. So it’s very attractive to us to consider bringing in other crops. But until recently, that just wasn’t economically feasible. So the new developments in what we call green indoor agriculture, mainly new forms of lighting, new forms of computer control, and irrigation and so forth — those make it possible now to grow competitive green products. And that would be very interesting to us, because they would use much of the same infrastructure that we have.
How is that a benefit to an incoming producer?
Well, one of the problems that people have in the green indoor agriculture industry today is reaching the levels of production that allow them to have the price point to be competitive with field-grown crops from areas like California, Mexico, Chile, etc.
In order to get to those costs, they have to ramp their production up to a level where their next problem is distribution...So for the last decade or so, the green indoor agriculture industry has been working on developing efficient techniques of growing that can compete with field crops. But they haven’t given a lot of thought to what happens when they actually produce those things in quantities.So I think their biggest challenge is to be able to both produce in large quantities and get that distributed...
But the newer facilities, they now employ aluminum shelving that has tracks, so that you can run different types of equipment up and down. And that makes a big difference.
The other of course is computer-controlled climate. So these systems are just getting more and more sophisticated. And not only do they do a good job of controlling the environment, but they collect a lot of data that can be used for analysis. One of the things that we’re interested in in the longer term is how that could become big data, where we could analyze — at a much larger scale — the impact of anything from climates to nutrients to agricultural pests, whatever, based on a larger base of of data.”
(via This small Pennsylvania region produces half the mushroom crop in the U.S. | PBS NewsHour)