For the Faaborg family, mushrooms were an acquired taste. Now, the family hopes to tap into a booming market for fresh mushrooms and mushroom-based products.
Situated about five miles southwest of Radcliffe, Rand and Tammy Faaborg’s 25-acre farm used to be home to up to 2,200 pigs, housed in two barns. Today, the hogs are gone, and the buildings are slowly being renovated into growing facilities for a variety of specialty mushrooms, as the family works to tap into a multibillion-dollar industry.
It’s a unique reimagining of a typical Iowa farming story.
When the Faaborgs first bought their farm in the late 1980s, they had no intention of getting into the hog business. Instead, they envisioned a tranquil life on a hobby farm. However, an attractive financial proposal soon swayed them to construct two hog confinements on the property under a new contract wean-to-finish business model. It was a business they operated successfully for more than 30 years.
As years passed and the couple aged, they began contemplating retirement and selling the farm.
“We didn’t know what the future of this farm would be,” said Tanner Faaborg, who — along with his older brother, Tyler, and their parents — is working to turn the farm into a one-of-a-kind business. “My parents were ready to retire. They didn’t want to do anything with the pigs anymore. They had money invested in these hog confinement buildings through 30 years of hard work.”
The solution came to Tanner after exploring a variety of potential agricultural uses for the existing hog buildings. “I knew nothing about mushrooms,” admitted Tanner, who says he initially wasn’t even a huge fan of the edible fungi. “I went down this mushroom rabbit hole, and I’m still living there because I love it. You can make these value-added products with all these medicinal benefits. But you can also provide local food and kind of localize that food economy with fresh produce.”
Today, the family’s business contains a line of mushroom-infused products, as well as medicinal tinctures, which are sold online and shipped nationwide.
They recently completed retrofitting the first hog building, enabling them to expand production. The farm plans to supply local and regional grocery stores with fresh mushroom varieties that are currently unavailable in the area, such as oyster and lion’s mane.
Tanner attributes much of their early success to the national and regional media attention they’ve received.
Last August, the farm was featured on the front page of The New York Times, and has been written about in the pages of The Guardian and the Des Moines Business Record. The farm will also be featured in several upcoming documentaries, including the sequel to the 2018 film The Game
Changers, co-produced by James Cameron.
“People started to gravitate towards (our story) because I think a lot of people are in the same situation where they have this infrastructure,” Tanner said. “They’ve been doing something, but they want to change it. The younger generation wants to farm in a different way.”
Tanner says that one of the goals of the farm is to be as sustainable as possible. To that end, the Faaborgs elected to install a solar array at the farm in 2015 and recently reclaimed their former hog lagoon, transforming it into a freshwater pond. They also source as many of their materials and base products as possible from local vendors and farmers.
“We’re hoping to be this catalyst for change, much-needed change, in the agriculture sector, because I think there needs to be this diversification,” Tanner said. “I think there needs to be more job creation, more opportunity in rural Iowa, less consolidation, more specialty crops, and more
family farms.
“So what can we do? What data can we collect? And what can we showcase? How can we farm in a sustainable way, build jobs in rural Iowa, and keep this family farm alive?”
