You may know it by its pungent aroma, but Kennett Square, a tiny borough in Chester County, Pennsylvania is also known as the Mushroom Capital of the World. It supplies nearly 60% of America’s mushrooms annually, followed by California. Farms in the region produced over 400 million pounds of mushrooms in 2023. Mushrooms have thrived in the area since they came to Kennett Square in the 19th Century. Consumers prefer mushrooms for their many varieties, health benefits and low environmental impact.
Mushroom farmers are on a 24/7/365 production cycle, as mushrooms do not require sunlight and have a quick yield. Harvesting mushrooms is labor-intensive: mushrooms are hand-picked, delicate and require cold storage. About 11 weeks after a crop is sown, mushrooms are harvested over several days. Crews start picking as early as 4 a.m.
According to Maria Gorgo-Simcox, an educator at Penn State University’s College of Agriculture Extension, the mushroom industry’s economic impact on the region is vast. Area farms employ nearly 8,600 people and contribute an estimated $1.1 billion per year to the local economy including sales, farm employment, taxes and value of service industries that support the farms. Recently, however, the industry has faced workforce and supply shortages.
Saurabh Bansal, a professor of supply chain management and faculty of operations research at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, wants to make the mushroom production process more efficient and ergonomically friendly.
Bansal’s co-authored paper “Redesigning Harvesting Processes and Improving Working Conditions in Agribusiness,” investigates the potential benefits of redesigning agribusiness operations — specifically, harvesting processes — to enhance both firm performance and working conditions of employees. He and his co-authors examined the process with one of Kennett’s largest mushroom producers, among the top three in the United States.
His research’s relevance and potential impact on industry led University of Delaware Operations Management Professors Darwin Davis and Caroline Swift to select Bansal as the fall lecturer for the W.L. Gore Lecture Series in Management Science at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics. The W.L.Gore Lecture Series in Management Science is sponsored by an endowment from the Gore family. It features experts in the application of probability, statistics, and experimental design to decision-making, including applications in academia, business, government, engineering and medicine.
Bansal also served on Swift’s dissertation committee at Penn State. He offers insights into what inspires his work and what professionals can take away from his research.
Lerner: What interested you in researching the mushroom supply chain?
Bansal: This project came to me in 2017 from a good friend who taught at Cornell, the late Nagesh Gavirneni. The collaborator/partner firm we worked with and the co-author of our paper, was coming to State College and Nagesh said I should meet with him.
The problem the collaborator/partner firm presented to me was this: two managers in the company were each running two different farms with several dozen rooms. Several dozen workers operated in these rooms. Both managers used different harvesting protocols. One of the managers said her protocol was more profitable than the other. The collaborator wanted to know if her protocol was better or if she just had better people on her farm.
I asked my MBA students to look into this problem. They did some analysis and came up with a simple decision support tool that showed that depending on how fast something grows and how fast your workers are one or the other protocol would yield the firm more profits. Ultimately it was just that the protocol was better.
The agricultural industry has not been looked at in detail in the business school research, so it is a natural opportunity for knowledge creation. Also, agriculture is a very human, intense activity. In fact, it is one of the largest employers of unskilled labor.
When you think about the impact one could have on the livelihoods of unskilled laborers that delta is substantial. Even if you could say, “I was able to increase our workers’ earnings by $200 per month for a worker doing an unskilled job,” that change is big.
The other dimension is we should care about the people we work with. But then, we are also trying to look at the firm’s perspective and maximize the firm’s profit. There is this inherent tension that if you want to take care of people as a firm, you have to let go of money or let go of your profit.
I wanted to look into this more and in 2018 my doctoral student Dongsheng Li worked on the research with me. We wanted to know, to what extent this is true. If this is not true, then, you can improve workers’ conditions almost for free. All these dimensions led us to think that this research could have a significant impact on people. We were also fortunate that we found a great collaborator.
Dongsheng, spent several days with the collaborator. He looked at the harvesting process and became friends with the harvesters. They were kind and generous to him. They shared their wisdom and insights to a large extent and shared data. Sometimes he had to record videos to study how they were doing things. And they were very gracious towards that.
Lerner: Why is it important for the UD community to learn about the outcomes of your research?
Bansal: When I talk to master’s level students or doctoral students, I usually tell them good practice for managers is to use numbers to support decision-making. But then, a lot of times when you’re trying to come up with the right numbers, you don’t know how to get started, especially with phenomena like manual harvesting of agricultural produce.
For graduate-level students, especially analytics students or students who are in supply chain management, it’s this view that you don’t necessarily need to be a math wizard to bring a positive change at work. The skills that you need are in basic management classes or supply chain management classes at almost all institutions. With a little bit of number crunching, you make a compelling case and break down pretty complex problems into reasonably sized problems. The other angle I articulate to students is that companies want to understand the implication of any suggested improvement to their bottom line.
Undergraduate students are motivated towards sustainability. They want to get into those things where we care about either the people, the process or the planet. And so when an individual, a young manager says we can do more to take care of our workers, the natural question that they’re going to get from senior management is, how much is that going to cost us? And if the answer is, I don’t know, nothing will happen with that idea.
But if a young manager can say, “look, here is some rough calculation it says we need to spend. We might lose about half a percent of our profit.” Now you are presenting a trade-off. The senior manager feels more comfortable in making that trade-off, because now they can go out and talk to their investors, or they can talk to their board and say that this is a trade-off we are facing: we can improve our workers’ condition by taking a hit of half a percent on profit and we should do it because the longevity of our workers’ tenure at our organization eventually will have other benefits.
The worst thing a manager can do is pretend that these trade-offs do not exist. The best thing that a manager can do is to quantify those trade-offs and use that information to support decision-making.
For agricultural students, it’s important to recognize that there are a lot of different dimensions of agriculture and recognize that the business side of managing agriculture can also have positive impacts in terms of taking care of workers.
Lerner: Was there anything that surprised you?
Bansal: We originally started looking at only the financial outcomes for the farm: what happens in each of these protocols in terms of farm profitability. As we spent more time there, we became acutely aware that workers’ ergonomic welfare in the agricultural industry is not given much attention because it is unskilled labor. There is a perception that it’s easy to get that labor, and I realized that was not the case, at least at our partner firm.
One manager told us that he was deeply worried about the well-being of his employees. He recognized that these individuals don’t have a lot of savings. They live from paycheck to paycheck. He explained that the current way workers harvested everything, having to stay bent over for a long time, was not good for workers’ backs.
He shared the workers would not tell him when their backs were hurting. When a worker says that he can’t come to work today, it means that not only will the worker not come in today, but he won’t come in the next week, and perhaps not even the next month, because his back is completely shot.
He wished they told him earlier so he could ask them to do something else. The surprising thing for us was that there was a recognition by the partner firm of the issue. But there was a lack of a solution. We needed to look at this from the firm’s and the workers’ perspectives.
That’s when we realized that it is possible to have this win-win solution where the collaborator/partner firm can care about its profit and workers. It may be beneficial for the workers to switch to another harvesting protocol in which they walk around and pick fewer units per hour, but the units are better quality. The workers’ bodies are less distressed.
Lerner: Were any of the recommendations you made implemented?
Bansal: Our main recommendation was that the collaborator/partner firm adopt the grazing harvesting protocol I described, and they are transitioning towards that.
The second item we brought to their attention was the benefit to the workers and their ergonomic conditions. There is now greater recognition by the collaborator/partner firm. Their managers can have a conversation with their workers (about their backs) and there is scientific evidence that it will be good for workers’ physical well-being.
Lerner: Will you be doing any follow-up research on this work?
Bansal: Typically when Ph.D. students work with a company, we hope they go looking for one thing, but they learned so much that it can fuel their entire dissertation and sometimes even their post-dissertation research.
So with Dongsheng, the same thing is happening. We were looking at the human dimension of harvesting. Penn State has a big Agricultural Sciences Department, and one of the things that we realized was that within the agricultural industry, this dimension of ergonomics, how well the physical arrangement of workspace is for workers’ backs, has not been looked at before.
So there is an opportunity to get grants. There is an opportunity to actually do more focused field-specific studies. We are also looking at how farms can coordinate mushroom production.