This farm raised thousands of pigs for slaughter. Now it's growing mushrooms instead

Tanner Faaborg poses for a photo at his farm in central Iowa. The Faaborg family grows specialty mushrooms at 1100 Farm in central Iowa. Madeleine Charis King/Iowa Public Radio hide caption

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."

Faaborg, along with his parents and brother, grows specialty mushrooms on their family farm in central Iowa and sells them as tinctures, coffee blends and flavored salt.

They call their operation 1100 Farm , which is a nod to the number of hogs this building and the one beside it each held for decades. The Faaborg family recently transitioned from pigs to mushrooms with technical and financial support from The Transfarmation Project, an initiative of the charitable organization, 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 Katherine Jernigan, who directs the project.

In addition to resources online and a network of experts to help farmers grow new crops and start small businesses, Transfarmation provides open-source blueprints for converting industrial pig, poultry and dairy barns.