On the day the Chester County Press reporter first arrived in southern Chester County in the summer of 1997, he stopped by the Landenberg Store and, having only a deferential knowledge of the mushroom industry, he casually asked the store’s proprietor, “What is that odor in the air out here?”

“Money,” the proprietor responded with a half-smile. “That is the smell of money, and there is nothing you can do about it, because out here, mushroom farmers are king and they can do anything they want including put nasty chemicals in the air and no one does anything about it because they aren’t told by anyone that they are required to abide by regulations because there are none, and they were here first.

“It’s all part of the contract of living here.”

Rendered into stubborn acceptance, the odor became the persistent white noise of the reporter’s life for the next 20 years. The odorous and invisible gas known as Hydrogen Sulfide – emanating from the composting of mushrooms into substrate -- was holding him and the thousands of residents in Landenberg, West Grove, Toughkenamon and Avondale hostage.

In 2022, the reporter became witness to the galvanizing rage of resident-led protests against neighboring mushroom farms. Their voices were not only emotional, they were also factual and organized. They called for New Garden Township to intervene on their behalf, which led the township to commission a year-long study of air quality in the vicinity by Dr. Lorenzo Cena, the Director of Environmental Health Programs and Associate Professor at West Chester University from February 2023 to February 2024. 

They took their cause to elected officials like State Rep. Christina Sappey and Sen John Kane, who embraced their concerns that led to meetings with mushroom industry officials and a town hall this past March with statewide experts in the areas of agriculture and health. They took their stories to the reporter, who documented the challenges they were facing both with their health and the impact that Hydrogen Sulfide was having – and continues to have – on their household appliances, some that have had to have been replaced numerous times at the homeowners’ expense. On this very page in the Chester County Press, he appealed to the mushroom industry to partner with residents, local governments, experts and state agencies to come up with scientific solutions to alleviate the odors.

For the first nine months of 2024, the mushroom industry remained quiet and then on Sept. 4, before an overflow audience of area residents at the New Garden Township Building, Cena delivered the factual bombshell that local residents had waited to hear, and the mushroom industry dreaded. Sharing the results of his report, Cena said the study’s findings revealed that Hydrogen Sulfide levels were 33 times higher than the recommended levels established by the DEP for the general public, who specifies that concentrations of the gas over the course of one hour should not exceed 0.1 ppm, (parts per million) and that concentrations over a 24-hour period should not exceed 0.005 ppm.

This time, and for the first time, however, the mushroom industry did not cower in their bunkers but took on the task of addressing this safety issue head on. Following Cena’s report,

American Mushroom Institute (AMI) President Rachel Roberts introduced a nine-month Mushroom Farm Compost Hydrogen Sulfide Mitigation Pilot study the agency has recently begun in partnership with Cena and the Mushroom Research Center at Penn State University. 

Over the next nine months, AMI will be overseeing the recordings that will be made by six MultiRae gas monitors and a weather station that will capture and calculate Hydrogen Sulfide levels near emission locations at an undisclosed Chester County mushroom farm.

In addition – and perhaps most importantly – the study will also oversee a mitigation practice that will involve the application of carbon activated tarps over wastewater “lagoons” to see if they lessen levels of Hydrogen Sulfide. 

While critics of the pilot program will claim that it is merely a knee-jerk reaction to a decades-long and unspoken blemish of southern Chester County, the truth is that finally, the industry has answered the most frequently asked question by residents who have had to live silently under these conditions for the same length of time: “When is enough enough?”