In the middle of winter, the mushroom farm at the center of the growing crisis in the United States was the site of one of the largest outbreaks of salmonella in U.S. history.
The outbreak has infected more than 8,000 people, and authorities say more than $500 million in lost food and supplies have been spent trying to contain it.
But the mushrooms at the Farm Sanctuary have a far more sinister past.
They’re made in a laboratory in New York City, with thousands of workers, some of whom are paid well above minimum wage, to harvest, transport, and pack the plants.
It’s a labor intensive, highly specialized task.
Some workers work 12-hour days for $10.50 an hour.
Others work 12 hours a day, five days a week, for an average of $16 an hour, according to an account from the nonprofit Food & Water Watch.
The farm is one of three mushroom farms in the state.
“It’s a major operation,” said Michael Smith, who has spent nearly 30 years in the business and now runs a nonprofit in Pennsylvania called the Mushrooms & Bean Company.
“It’s one of those companies where the bottom line is always bottom line, and that’s what I do.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s very close to it.”
As it has in the past, the farm has hired contractors to help with the packing and shipping of the mushrooms, and it has hired its own security team to keep the operation safe.
It is a small operation, but in recent months the farm and its operations have grown so large and complex that federal authorities have begun looking into whether the farm could be linked to other large mushroom farms across the country.
A few weeks ago, they announced they were going to take a closer look at the farm.
The investigation, which began in May, involved interviews with people at the mushroom farms, their employees, and the owners of the other farms.
They have been conducting the interviews on a confidential basis with a team of law enforcement officials in New Jersey, and investigators have also been visiting the farm, including the people who work there.
There have been more than 100 people in the farm since the outbreak began in July, according a source familiar with the investigation.
It took the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations nearly a month to identify a person of interest who was in the Farm sanctuary, the source said.
The farm is in the Bronx, and people in New Bedford and other towns have seen the farm as the symbol of their communities.
It was the largest of the three mushroom farm operations in the nation, with about 300 workers at the time of the outbreak, according with Food & Wine magazine.
There are now more than 700 people working there.
A spokesman for the Farm Department of Agriculture said the Farm Safe Mushrooms program, which allows farmers to get contracts with other companies, was created in 2010 to help them manage the risks associated with growing mushrooms.
“These are highly specialized and specialized operations,” said Dan Stearns, the director of Farm Safe.
“There is a lot of oversight of everything.
So it’s a very safe operation.
We’re not trying to be a mushroom farm, we’re trying to do the best we can.”
The Department of Health and Human Services has approved the FarmSafe contract.
The Farm Sanctuary is part of the USDA’s Migrant Farm Protection Program, which helps to control the spread of salvo-resistant infections.
The contract with the Farm & Beyond program, part of which is in New Brunswick, N.J., is similar, and was approved in July.
“We have had no contact with the farm at this point,” Stears said.
The company is not being investigated by federal officials, he added.
He declined to discuss details of the investigation or the possible connection between the Farm Safety program and other mushroom farms.
The Farm Sanctuary, in the midst of a huge mushroom boom, is not the only operation in the area.
In New York, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has been investigating the Farm Fair, an annual food festival that brings thousands of people to the state from around the country to eat the produce they buy.
The department says it has identified more than 2,000 violations and a few dozen arrests in New Hampshire over the past two weeks, with more arrests expected.