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Inside a long, dimly-lit building, Tyler Faaborg slipped into a “fruiting room” cordoned off by what looked like plastic curtains. Fog rolled over shelves of sprouting mushrooms. A bulbous fungi called lion’s mane still had another week before harvest, he explained.
“You can see they’re sort of, a little bit pinkish,” Faaborg said. “When they get mature, they’re going to be almost all the way white.”
Tyler Faaborg, along with his parents and brother, grow specialty mushrooms on their family farm in central Iowa and sell them as tinctures, coffee blends and flavored salt.
They call their operation 1100 Farm, which is a nod to the number of hogs each of their two buildings held for decades. The Faaborg family recently transitioned from pigs to mushrooms with technical and financial support from The Transfarmation Project, which is part of the charity Mercy for Animals.
“We primarily work with industrial animal farmers to help them transition out of that way of farming and into sustainable practices, and that can be growing mushrooms, growing diversified vegetables, incorporating trees and agroecology,” said the organization's director Katherine Jernigan.
Along with resources online and a network of experts to help farmers grow new crops and start a small business, Transfarmation provides open-source blueprints for converting industrial pig, poultry and dairy barns.
“That’s really what makes Transfarmation unique,” Jernigan said. “We're finding ways to repurpose the infrastructure that the farmers already have.”
The Faaborg family farm was once a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines CAFOs as operations that meet certain animal number thresholds and confine them in an area without vegetation for at least 45 days out of the year.
There are more than 20,000 medium and large-sized CAFOs across the U.S., according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Iowa led with 3,938 such operations in 2024. Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas also had high numbers.
The Faaborgs finished converting half of one 200-foot-long hog barn this summer. They say the retrofitted space will allow them to scale up their mushroom production after a successful pilot project. It’s also meant to be a resource for other farmers as Transfarmation’s second demonstration hub in the U.S. The first is a former chicken farm in North Carolina.
“The reason we established this as a demonstration hub is very much so the doors can be opened, so people can come and see firsthand,” Jernigan said. “They can ask questions, and also, importantly, we're collecting data from this hub with the whole transition, as well as their production.”
The data include the Faaborgs’ costs, hours of labor and product margins, along with lessons learned along the way. A Transfarmation spokesperson said the Faaborgs are being compensated $216,000 through a four-year contract for tracking and sharing their information.
Jernigan said other farms enrolled in the Transfarmation program have shown it’s possible to be profitable switching from concentrated animal feeding operations to specialty crops. Transfarmation’s website includes estimated budgets for strawberries, tomatoes and microgreens.
But having more test cases and being transparent about both the challenges and opportunities could help other farmers make the leap, she said.
Tanner Faaborg, the one who brought the vision of 1100 Farm to the family several years ago, wants their mushroom operation to be another “proof of concept.”
“It just takes someone doing something a little different to help folks realize that it is possible,” he said.
How it started
Tanner Faaborg said his parents, Rand and Tammy, bought their 25-acre farm in the 1980s with the dream of a homesteading lifestyle. The family of seven harvested and preserved produce from their garden and fruit trees. They had a wood burning stove and chickens for eggs.
Rand Faaborg said he tried raising a few market hogs for “pocket money” to supplement his income as a welder. But it didn’t work out.
“I lost money,” Faaborg said. “And then I saw in the paper this advertisement of contract feeding and called a guy.”
Under this setup, a company provides the animals and pays for the feed while the farmer contributes the labor and covers the costs of the infrastructure. Rand Faaborg said contract feeding seemed like a good opportunity at the time.
Rand Faaborg did not put up new buildings for the enterprise at first. He retrofitted existing buildings on the farm to raise 2,000 hogs at a time. He said it was “very profitable” but required more work than he expected on top of his day job.
“I was working 16 hour days, sometimes 24 hour days, going to work without even sleeping,” he said. “That was hard. We did that for a few years, and then [the company] came out with this program where they would finance these buildings.”
The new hog barns, designed for efficiency, had automatic feeder lines and systems to move the manure out to an open air holding pit. Rand Faaborg said the total cost for both barns was over $400,000.
“Fortunately, we could make cash flow until we got the buildings paid off,” he said, explaining it took 12 years to get out of debt.
But raising hogs was physically demanding work and became less profitable for the family over time, he said.
“In my day job, my pay over 35 years increased tenfold, and my pay raising hogs dropped by two-thirds,” Rand Faaborg said.
As livestock production has shifted toward large-scale industrial operations in recent decades, dozens of research studies have documented negative health impacts on workers as well as surrounding communities. These operations also generate large amounts of nutrient-rich manure, which can pollute surrounding waterways and ecosystems.
Rand and Tammy Faaborg decided several years ago they were ready to exit the hog business. He said they didn't have a deep love for raising pigs, but they had poured so much money and time into the buildings that they didn’t want to see them fall into disrepair, only to be bulldozed.
They asked their family if they had ideas to use the buildings for something else. That’s when their son, Tanner, began to lay out his vision.
“We have this infrastructure. We could retrofit it, change it, and do something that is a lot healthier on us, healthier for the planet, and actually is profitable, that'll be a job creator for the family, but for the community, as well,” Tanner Faaborg said.
Converging two worlds
Tanner Faaborg said he developed a passion for sustainability and climate change mitigation in college. After traveling abroad for several years, he returned to Iowa and joined Urban Ambassadors, a volunteer-driven nonprofit that promotes sustainability in the Des Moines area. He represented the group as part of the steering committee for the city’s climate action and adaptation plan.
But his work in Iowa’s capital felt out of line with other parts of his life.
“I would come back [to the farm] and help out with pig chores, kind of living a double life that I felt terrible about," he recalled.
The Faaborgs raised around 8,000 hogs each year, producing roughly a million gallons of liquid manure. They stored it in an open pit until they could find row-crop farmers to haul it off to spread on their fields during tight windows in the spring and fall.
While manure can provide essential crop nutrients, it also contributes to climate change.
Manure stored in pits and lagoons release methane, which is “28 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere,” according to the EPA. And excess manure in fields can increase nitrous oxide emissions and pollute waterbodies by flushing out with rain and eroded soil.
Tanner Faaborg said he was also bothered by the reshaping of rural Iowa from industrial agriculture. Down the road from his childhood home, he pointed to long buildings surrounded by corn fields.
“There used to be a house over there. Now, instead, there's turkey barns,” he said. “There used to be a house over there, and now it's hog barns.”
Where Tanner Faaborg saw an opportunity for change, his brother Tyler needed more convincing. Tyler Faaborg said he marketed around 200,000 hogs a year across three counties when he decided to try something different with his family.
“I had a good job. I got paid well,” he said. “But I did it for 25 years. It’s really hard on your body, and Tanner just kept talking to me about it.”
The Faaborgs began working with Transfarmation in 2021 and sold the last herd of hogs a year later. With a $15,000 grant from the program in 2023, they experimented with growing mushrooms and developing products as a year-long pilot project. The Faaborgs reported site preparations in one of their outbuildings, supplies, branding and website development cost roughly $35,000.
As the business grows and expands with the new demonstration hub, Tyler Faaborg said the family would like to sell fresh mushrooms to a few companies. Eventually, 1100 Farm could convert the second hog barn. But Tanner Faaborg said it would be used for something else, possibly microgreens.
The Faaborgs said the transition from CAFO to specialty mushrooms has not always been easy, and they have a long road ahead. But there have been rewards along the way, like the conversion of a manure pit into a freshwater pond.
A U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service grant program partially funded the remediation, Tanner Faaborg said. Instead of being an eyesore, he said it’s become a haven for frogs, ducks and other wildlife.
“It just shows that if you create the right environment, that rewilding can happen faster than you think,” he said.
Rand Faaborg said the manure pit was a significant source of anxiety when he raised hogs. He watched the level rise and hoped farmers would take it away before it reached capacity. Sometimes people said they would take it but not show up, he added.
“That part of my life is gone and in exchange is just this little pond. My grandkids catch frogs. It’s just been great,” Rand Faaborg said. “That’s probably been my favorite part of it all.”
The Faaborgs have also planted native grasses and wildflowers to support pollinators. They’re expanding their orchard and adding hundreds of trees and shrubs next to the creek that cuts across their farm to support wildlife habitat and better water quality.
Standing next to an empty grain silo, Tanner Faaborg said he’d like to turn it into a space for visitors to stay overnight and wake up the next morning with a view of the farm while sipping lion’s mane coffee.
The list of projects are enough to fill his lifetime. But Tanner Faaborg hopes the impact of 1100 Farm extends well beyond that.
The original story was produced and published by Iowa Public Radio.
This version is being distributed by Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
