MAGIC MUSHROOMS

From the start, Huerto Rico was like no urban farming start-up I’d visited before. When I approached its then-headquarters in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, for the first time in 2019, I became a bit nervous. As an editor at an agriculture-focused magazine in New York, I had seen big money scale up production of hydroponic lettuce, herbs, and—yes—mushrooms, which are Huerto Rico’s focus. But these headquarters looked like a nondescript suburban home, not the warehouses I was accustomed to, with their sleek technology controlling temperature, light, and humidity.

Sebastían Sagardia, Huerto Rico’s founder, answered the door in a baseball cap and T-shirt. He had quit his advertising job a few months earlier, following his dream to bring specialty culinary mushrooms to the Puerto Rican market. Sagardia rented the space from an owner who let him use it rent-free for three months if he fixed it up himself. The incubation room, which sat just beyond the living room, stank of rot. Bags of wood waste, sterilized and inoculated with mushroom spores, showed signs of mycelium growth, the rootlike tangles from which edible matter emerges. They would remain there for around two weeks before moving to the fruiting room. There, audible delight replaced my trepidation: Through cool white fog, I could