Before mushrooms went mainstream, before the commercial growing kits, foraging apps and mushroom coffees, William Padilla-Brown was exploring fungi in uncharted territory. His research into mushroom cultivation, his innovative uses of fungi and his community-building mycology programs have helped advance the field while opening doors to curious and independent citizen scientists like him.
Padilla-Brown forages Ganoderma with his children in Pennsylvania
Padilla-Brown is a veritable mycological star. He’s featured in numerous documentaries, including the critically-acclaimed Fantastic Fungi, has authored books including the first English literature on Cordyceps cultivation in the world (which he wrote at 22), spoken on dozens of podcasts, and has amassed over 100K Instagram followers. His venture, MycoSymbiotics, is a multifaceted mycological business offering farmed and foraged mushroom goods, consultation and research services, agritourism experiences and a suite of educational offerings. Padilla-Brown operates across disciplines on molecular and macro levels all at once, and the results are fascinating.
Padilla-Brown’s freeze-dried lion’s mane extract
Mushrooms piqued Padilla-Brown’s interest early. He landed in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania as a teen whose father’s job brought them to the Defense Distribution Depot Susquehanna Pennsylvania (DDSP). Padilla-Brown left high school at 16 and was “super counter culture,” before starting a family at age 20. Unsure of his next steps, it wasn’t until his partner’s mother introduced him to people practicing permaculture in Camp Hill that he found a clear framework. “That changed my whole life,” he says. “I started studying permaculture with Susquehanna Botanicals [then Susquehanna Apothecary]. They taught me permaculture design and I started my whole career off of that.”
Padilla-Brown with cultivated cordyceps in 2016
Determined to establish his own self-reliant permaculture system and lifestyle, Padilla-Brown took inventory of his surroundings. “I started to assess what I needed and what wasn’t available to me in our area so that I could live the life I wanted to live and raise my family the way that I wanted to raise my family, where I’m at. Then I started providing those things.”
He zeroed in on mushrooms, and quickly understood that he’d need to educate himself. “I realized that almost no schools in the world offered the education that I wanted to get. I wanted to learn how to be an expert in biotech and to learn about mycology. To this day, there are not many schools that offer a mycology degree,” he says. “You have to take plant pathology and look at mushrooms and fungi through the lens of plant pathogens on a university level. So I realized at a young age that, if I wanted to become the professional that I wanted to be, and become an expert on the things I wanted to know about, I had to do it myself.”
He found experts online and consumed their literature and videos extensively. Then, he connected with PASA Sustainable Agriculture and the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) and learned from those same experts in person at live events and conferences. It wasn’t long before Padilla-Brown had enough expertise to began sharing it with others. He says, “I started teaching mushroom classes because I realized that there are a lot of people like me, who need this kind of stuff but are in a position where they’re not able to go and access it. I figured I would become the point for accessing nuanced experiences, mostly around agriculture and the environment.”
Padilla-Brown teaching early in his career
Padilla-Brown has now directly taught over 10,000 people, many of whom travel to Pennsylvania to learn from him. He leads foraging expeditions, cultivation courses, extraction classes and other programming while producing informative (and entertaining) reel and blog content through his online channels.
Padilla-Brown’s signature event is MycoFest, the largest mushroom and arts festival in North America. It takes place every year in Pennsylvania on the first weekend in August, bringing mycologists and the myco-curious of all ages together for three days of workshops, forays, food and fun. “We generally find over 200 varieties of mushrooms,” he says. “There have been occasions where we found unique species that haven’t been identified by science. People come from all over the world; we’ve had experts from as far as Uganda come out and teach about mushrooms and fungi, what they do, how they farm and their studies. We have professors from universities around the country talking about cutting edge research projects. And then we have live music and a whole vendor village with lots of artists.”
Mycofest
This year’s MycoFest takes place in Artemas, Pennsylvania, on Friday, July 31 through Sunday, August 2. Tickets vary from day passes to full-weekend camping packages with significant discounts for youth aged 17 – 19 and free foray add-ons for any ticket holder. Guests can look forward to immersive foraging experiences with expanded woodland access, workshops and skill sharing on cultivation, food preparation and re-wilding, and community-building around the fire at night. It’s meant to be as inclusive and engaging for field experts as for young people just learning about fungi for the first time.
MycoFest closing ceremony
Meanwhile, Padilla-Brown continues forging ahead with his work, which is so aligned with his personal passions as to be indistinguishable. His enthusiasm for mushrooms is contagious and his expertise staggering. To watch one of his reels is to watch five – the content is authentic, intriguing and engrossing. Padilla-Brown’s recent focal points include ongoing cultivation of novel native varieties, making products using Super Negin saffron (the highest grade of saffron in the world), and wild Appalachian truffles-everything, from truffle hunting with his newly-trained truffle dog, Benny, to producing a documentary about truffles that comes out in August, 2026.
Benny the truffle hound
Padilla-Brown also produces a wide range of products from the mushrooms he forages and farms. Currently in the Mycosymbiotics shop you’ll find food items like ceremonial cacao mushroom honey blend, dried culinary and medicinal mushrooms, Mycopop functional energy drinks, and mushroom umami sauce. There’s also a wide range of potent wellness products, like wild-crafted Pennsylvania fire cider elixir made with ramps and chicken of the woods, reishi chamomile lavender tincture and a premium saffron extract available in two levels of potency. The products offerings shift with the seasons and harvests, and many are available in limited, small batch quantities, so check back often.
As he pushes the boundaries of mycology forward with his research and innovative product development, Padilla-Brown sticks to his values of caring for what’s native, utilizing what’s natural and building community with the people around him. Connect with Mycosymbiotics yourself through the newsletter, Facebook and Instagram pages, and by checking out MycoFest this summer!
- Photos: William Padilla-Brown, Mycosymbiotics
