ON A HAZY AUGUST AFTERNOON, a troupe of excited twenty-somethings fanned out into the muggy shade of oaks and hemlocks in the woods of central Pennsylvania. Speaking sparingly, eyes fixed to the ground, they traced the mossy, wooded flank of a tributary to the Susquehanna River.

As I followed along on my first-ever Cordyceps hunt, it was presumptuous to even hope to be the first to spot the rare fungus. Yet less than 15 minutes into our foray, a slender orange mushroom in a mossy ditch caught my eye, and I called out to the group leader. William Padilla-Brown didn’t need to get close to see that, unsurprisingly, I had struck upon fungal fool’s gold: a cinnabar chanterelle. “The colors look very similar, especially this time of year,” he said graciously. “You really have to get in here and tune in. It’s a very refined situation that you have to create for yourself.”

The 25-year-old mycologist then disappeared between the trees to regroup with his companions. Not two minutes had passed before a triumphant shout reverberated from down the creek. “Yooo! Cordyceeeps! Woohoo!” Scrambling over logs and ditches, I discovered the group in a crouched huddle along an embankment beside the creek. Edging in, it took nearly a minute before I could see the fungus at the center of all the fuss, a tiny ocher apostrophe hovering above the wet underbrush. Our companion, Jacob Alvarez, had found the little thing, no larger than a baby’s pinkie, that marked the troop’s first big find of the day. The collective energy was suddenly charged and borderline ecstatic.

Cordyceps (cordies or cheetos, to those in the know) are subjects of intense passion for a growing number of young mycophiles across North America. They’re at the center of a growing community of independent, tinkering cultivators, and a boutique nutraceutical economy in which Padilla-Brown and his cohort represent the DIY cutting edge.

Cordyceps are subjects of intense passion for a growing number of young mycophiles across North America.

Another reason for the rising profile of these fungi is the shocking lifestyle they’ve evolved. Cordyceps are entomopathogenic, meaning they kill insects. But they don’t just kill them. One of the scenarios most often recounted plays out like a scene from The Body Snatchers. It starts when the spores of a certain species of Cordyceps take root in the carapace of an ant — different species target different insects. Hyphae then thread throughout the insect’s tiny body, eventually seizing control of its nervous system. The ant becomes, in effect, a living zombie, unwittingly stumbling up a nearby branch, inevitably one that sits directly over the path most used by its hive mates. There, its final, irresistible impulse is to latch its jaws upon the twig, dying as the mycelium finally consumes all the insect’s innards. After that comes the unsettling coda; out of the back of the ant’s tiny neck slithers a slender “stroma,” its surface bristling and primed to rain spores down upon the next group of unfortunate ants below. The species of Cordyceps found under this particular fern, though, targeted not ants but moth pupae.

“Typically, the bug is not going to be less than a couple centimeters below, so I can tell pretty much exactly where this insect is right now,” Padilla-Brown said coolly, peering into the small cavity beneath the foliage. Everyone else had gone silent, and for a moment the mossy microclimate of that small square foot of forest floor had become a zone of reverence. In harvesting the fungus, there was a risk of damaging or breaking off the insect from which it grew; pickers take pains to avoid severing mushroom from bug so as to collect as much of the mycelium as possible.

A bystander offered his knife, but Padilla-Brown opted to use his fingers. The sandy soil offered little resistance. “Sometimes you’ll be within the root zone of a tree, and you don’t want to nick it with a knife, because you might get some kind of fungal contamination into it,” he said. “Sustainable, ethical harvest of Cordyceps militaris. Again, a very refined thing.”

The unfortunate arthropod finally emerged, and Padilla-Brown raised it up slowly for display. Between his tattooed fingers was a wad of dirt that roughly traced the shape of the pupa inside, a one-inch, two-tone stroma of C. militaris poking straight out from the top. There were big plans in store for this little fungus. As people maneuvered for a better look, someone asked what it was good for. “This has incredible energetic properties,” Padilla-Brown answered. “It’s really good for your immune system. It’s really good for prostate health and sexual function. There are many desirable traits to this mushroom.”

By the end of our two-hour hike, the specimen was joined in its plastic storage box by nearly a dozen others, separated by dividers to keep their spores from intermingling.

IF PADILLA-BROWN HAS AN OFFICIAL CATCHPHRASE, it might be “propagate and myceliate,” a mycological metaphor for purposefully cultivating social connections and spreading ideas through communities of practice and cultures of exchange.

A bona fide mycological influencer, his profile has been steadily growing beyond the realm of fungi. He has tens of thousands of followers on social media and has been profiled in a growing list of articles and documentaries. He’s an author as well, with two well-received books on the cultivation of C. militaris, including the first on the subject written in English, and a seemingly endless list of ancillary projects that orbit the central goal of demonstrating and encouraging circular, local, sustainable models for small-scale agriculture. On top of that, he is also a father, and maintains a parallel career as a hip-hop artist, under the moniker It’s Cosmic. One of his songs includes the lyric: “I just had an epiphany / Monetize myself be my own industry / I’m in this naturally, synergy / They just wanna snatch some of my energy.”

Despite these accomplishments, Padilla-Brown has no formal education in mycology, ecology, economics, politics, nor any other field one might expect given the scope of his work. He describes himself as a “graduate of Google Scholar.” The son of parents in the US Army and the Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service, at various points in his childhood Padilla-Brown found himself living in London, Mexico City, and Taipei, before ultimately settling in Pennsylvania. Moving from state to state, country to country, school to school, resulted in a fragmented education. Ultimately, after he dropped out of high school at age 16, he spent the next two years “focused inwards,” meditating, traveling, spending time in nature, and experimenting with mind-altering substances.

“I’d be going outside and walking a lot, and getting visuals and things, but I realized a lot of the visuals were just the understanding of natural patterns,” he said. “Once I understood it, I would go to some other level. And I was, like: Wow, I can really understand the way nature works; maybe I should be working with nature.”

Having grown up largely in urban environments, seeing trees as just “green blurs alongside the highway,” Padilla-Brown first undertook the study of permaculture. A preternatural autodidacticism helped him advance his skills and knowledge in spite of a disjointed educational experience. For a time, he became enamored by the cannabis industry, the niche economies and culture of experimentation that formed around quality products, and the inherent potential for sustainable land stewardship, all of which has informed what he hopes to accomplish with fungi.

The global medicinal fungi industry could exceed $50 billion by 2025.

At age 18, Padilla-Brown began growing mushrooms. Two years after that, and shortly after the birth of his son, Leo, he committed to making a living in pursuit of mycology and his nascent concepts of social permaculture.

“I was, like, I can’t keep working as a server. I couldn’t get good jobs because I was a high school dropout. I had [Leo] when I was 20, and I was, like, I’m not going to let myself fall into this stereotypical ‘young Black male high school dropout with a kid that can’t get a good job.’ So I was like, screw it. I quit my job the year he was born, and I was like, I’m going all in.”

The gambit paid off, as Padilla-Brown finds himself in demand as a speaker and the increasingly familiar face of young, diverse eco-entrepreneurship. Though he’s wary of tokenism in some spaces where he’s invited to teach or speak, his message since has remained one of, in essence, “If I can do this, anyone can, and more people should.”

THERE ARE MORE THAN FOUR HUNDRED SPECIES of Cordyceps, each associated with a specific insect: spiders, grasshoppers, wasps, to name a few. In Tibet, Ophiocordyceps sinensis and its host moth larvae are methodically plucked from the foothills of the Himalayas. Locally known as yarza g ̈unbu, or “winter worm, summer grass,” it is regarded as a potent aphrodisiac, often fetching a higher price than gold, always with the insect still attached.

In North America, alongside mushrooms like lion’s mane, maitake, turkey tail, and Chaga, Cordyceps has emerged at the center of a fast- growing domestic market for medicinal fungi, representing a global industry that is expected to exceed $50 billion by 2025.

The medicinal benefits of Cordyceps are largely credited to a special compound it produces, called cordycepin. The compound has been associated with anti-cancer, anti-fatigue, anti-inflammatory, immune, and sexual function-boosting properties, among other benefits, elevating it to the realm of fungal superfood, complete with the full range of branding and value-added products that term implies. It’s now easy to find Cordyceps coffee, butter, powder for adding to your smoothies, and as an ingredient in tinctures and extracts.

Ongoing research into medicinal mushrooms is promising, but as is often true of traditional and trendy medicines, the science is not yet conclusive. Just as much as any physiological benefits, though, medicinal mushrooms pose an opportunity to exercise medicinal sovereignty and independence from pharmaceuticals, while serving as the basis of community-scale economies.

For the cultivator, it also poses an enticing challenge. Cordyceps aren’t anywhere near so easy to grow as, say, oyster or shiitake mushrooms. Cultivation is carried out by large-scale facilities in China or other parts of Asia, which understandably do not go to great effort to share their methods with American growers. English-language materials documenting how to grow the recalcitrant orange fungus were essentially nonexistent until Padilla-Brown published his first cultivation guide in 2017. Since then, a fast-growing community of small-scale cultivators and genetic tinkerers has sprung up around the country and the world.

“That was wild; that really changed a lot of stuff,” Padilla-Brown said of his first book and the activity it has helped to inspire. Within a month of its publication, he said, people in more than 20 countries had bought the books. Padilla-Brown also appears to be the first in the country ever to grow the mushrooms commercially; meanwhile, others have launched their own businesses around cultivating the fungus, such as Mushroom Revival, currently the largest producer of C. militaris in the country.

Before these developments, domestically grown, whole Cordyceps fruiting bodies were nearly impossible to find on the market, driving their import price as high as $120 and $100 per dry ounce. Part of the goal in developing accessible cultivation methods was to get these prices down so that a domestic market could emerge — Padilla-Brown tends to sell whole mushrooms for five dollars a gram — which is indeed what appears to be happening.

The methods outlined in Padilla-Brown’s book use brown rice as the substrate, a much more accessible — and less disturbing — method than inoculating living insects, a method often used overseas. But Cordyceps are more temperamental than many other types of marketable fungi in various ways. Cloning them is not as simple as with other mushrooms, as they are particularly sensitive to timing and light and can breed into new strains that never actually form fruiting bodies, which is the whole point of cultivating them. Breeding them generally requires either sequencing their DNA to find compatible mating types, or precisely isolating pairs of their threadlike ascospores under a microscope in order to get a reproductive match. Most strains last about nine months before they senesce and stop producing.

Developing the methods for propagating these temperamental mushrooms required an immense amount of trial and error, and Padilla-Brown didn’t crack the code by himself. Detroit-based cultivator and Ganoderma artist Ryan Paul Gates spent many hours translating documents and videos from Thailand and elsewhere. With the decoded methods in hand, Padilla-Brown managed to coax his first Cordyceps to “pin” from a specimen discovered by Charlie Aller, an independent mushroom educator and cultivator, who handed it over to Padilla-Brown at a mycological festival in a gesture of camaraderie, and in hopes of seeing him succeed in cultivating it.

“It was the difficulty of it, I think, that created this hype around it, because people had been trying to do it for a long time,” said Aller, whose nickname in the cordy community is Charlieceps. “I was personally moved by its medicinal value; I had an experience with Lyme disease, and I feel like Cordyceps was one of the linchpin organisms that brought me on home to some sort of health and normalcy. Once that had happened, I felt like I sort of owed it something beyond the more casual sort of reciprocal relationship of grower and consumer, organism and cultivator.”

Our hike in the Pennsylvania woods represented what was called a “pheno hunt.” Each new specimen uncovered in the woods would be brought straight into basement labs, where Cordyceps obsessives would toil to tease out and propagate the most desirable traits. Some look for strange and interesting morphologies, or high yields and fast grow times; ideally, they would also produce the most cordycepin, but to identify specific compounds required sophisticated biochemical analysis that few, if any, could perform or afford.

The designer strains that resulted from these field trips and selections formed the basis of an emerging economy of exchange, carried out at mycological meetups, festivals, and, of course, online.

Every day, more “cheeto” photos appear on mushroom Instagram as experienced and emerging cultivators show off their successes. Tangles of bulbous orange, sometimes even deep red (the “flaming hot” variety, as they’re sometimes called) fungi compete for attention and draw the admiration of those tuned in to these efforts at pushing the genetic envelope.

Part of the hope in promoting ethically, sustainably sourced, and unmitigated mushrooms is that they’ll be worth the extra price to conscious consumers. Here the cannabis industry sets an example. High-quality extracts such as oils, concentrates, hash, shatter, and other refined forms are familiar to informed cannabis consumers. A very similar product class is beginning to emerge around Cordyceps and other medicinal mushrooms. The question remains open whether there is as high a ceiling in the market for medicinal fungi as there is for pain relief and recreation represented by CBD and THC.

AS I DESCENDED INTO THE BASEMENT of Padilla-Brown’s Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, home, a pink glow gave the impression that I was entering a mad scientist’s lair. That was, in fact, not far from the reality.

Hidden in the corner behind a zip-up air lock was Padilla-Brown’s lab. Positive air pressure ensured that contaminants escaped, rather than entered, and a stereo made sure that he didn’t lose his mind after a full day of staring into readouts and petri dishes. Multicolor agar plates were stacked in the corner, encrusted white with dried bleach, a measure taken against soil mites that often hitchhike on Cordyceps.

In a small refrigerator in the corner, stacks of bleach-free plates contained the strains he’d been cloning; many were the result of previous phenohunts. After finding the mushrooms, he’d cloned them in the agar, and with a scalpel and sterilizer had propagated the resulting mycelia in dozens of glass jars stacked on racks outside the air lock.

“When you deal with all these clones, probably like 20 to 50 percent if you’re lucky are going to produce mushrooms,” he said. “A lot of them won’t do anything. So the ones that produce mushrooms, I then took spores from those, and then I did breeding, which took a long time, and I had to figure out the whole DNA thing. I taught myself molecular biology in like two and a half months.”

“I taught myself molecular biology in like two and a half months.”

A flow hood was set up next to a microscope. Beside that was a small thermocycler, used to prepare samples for genetic sequencing. Padilla-Brown conducted his own analyses to determine mating types, using primers ordered by mail and set to target the relevant genetic segments. He wouldn’t need to go through the entire sequencing process, though. After preparing samples from a newly cloned specimen, he could visually assess their mating types using relatively simple gel electrophoresis — the process that separates genetic samples by length into easily read parallel rows, or “bands” —usually an intermediate step taken to verify sample quality before sequencing. The whole process took about two hours.

On the counter, I recognized the stapler-sized field sequencer I’d seen at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Padilla-Brown was excited about the possibilities posed by sequencing genetics in the field. He was looking to DNA to assess breeding compatibility, suggesting a wider range of fungal applications for the emerging sequencing technologies. In teaching these citizen science techniques, Padilla-Brown hopes others would take and run with them as he has. “My hope really is that people start working with this technology and figure out other stuff,” he said.

“As far as mushrooms go, most people just do genetic identification, but there’s so many other things we can do. It goes way beyond taxonomy; that’s just what people focus on.”

I had to take a mental step back and appreciate the scene. Here was someone without any formal scientific education, casually innovating genetic-sequencing and cultivation techniques in his basement that not only produced interesting biological results, but also served as the basis of several small but successful businesses.

Exiting the air lock, we walked up to the source of the pink light. A series of warehouse racks upheld corridors of glass jars, the twisting orange fingers of Cordyceps growing atop cakes of myceliated rice. Held up by bungee cord and a stepladder, banks of LED lights provided the light wavelengths determined to maximize growth: red, pink, and blue, the latter of which encouraged the mushrooms to pin.

Padilla-Brown wore sandals that revealed his toenails painted in vivid purple. He stepped over green stains on the cement floor, where a spirulina experiment had gone wrong. Pressure cookers were strewn about, unused for some time. For the time being, he was focused more on writing the next cultivation book than producing mushrooms at any kind of economic scale. The mushrooms he was growing would be put to use by Cassandra Posey, who, at the time, was his partner in both senses of the word.

Upstairs, we sat down for dinner, where Posey joined us to explain their business concepts and goals for the future. Posey, whose company Cognitive Function made use of the Cordyceps grown in the basement as the basis of its line of tinctures, ghee, coffee, honey, and other fungi-infused products, had in turn helped improve the branding of Padilla-Brown’s company, MycoSymbiotics. She hustled from coast to coast to get people interested in the “forest to table” health products produced by her, Padilla-Brown, and the growing community of eco-entrepreneurs in which they were becoming leaders.

“Will thinks very here and now, which is so great — I wish I could be more present in the moment,” she said as we set down our forks. “But my parents heavily instilled a lot of the big-picture, five-year-plan kind of thing into me. I grew up watching my dad run a company, and all that is like my playground.”

“I’m not a business person at all,” added Padilla-Brown, pulling out a Nintendo Switch as our energy wound down with the evening. “I’m not good at business; I don’t like doing business; I like doing whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it, which is beneficial for the students that I teach.”

The couple, I realized, were a living example of brand synergy, finding a productive intersection between Posey’s business acumen and Padilla-Brown’s multifarious projects and experiments. They told me of a story from the time just before they’d started dating. Padilla-Brown had managed to ferment cacao beans with Cordyceps mycelium, a difficult trick given its temperamental nature. On a visit to New York, he presented them to Posey as a gift. Half-joking she said, “That’s when I fell in love with him.”

This article has been adapted from Bierend’s new book, In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms. It was reproduced by permission of Chelesa Green Publishing.