Meet a Family That’s Betting the Farm on a Wild Idea. Literally.

[cigaretteman]

For years Rand Faaborg, a father of five in rural Iowa, wanted to get out of hog farming. He just didn’t know how.
He’d built two barns in 1991, a few hundred yards from the family’s farmhouse, and fattened up thousands of hogs at a time. But by 2020, Mr. Faaborg was exhausted and making a fraction of what he’d earned from hogs three decades earlier. He and his wife felt trapped. They didn’t want to raise hogs anymore or live alongside them, yet they had poured half a million dollars into paying off the loans on the barns and replacing the roofs.

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“I don’t know that I could even get across how much work we have spent over these decades down here with these buildings,” said Mr. Faaborg, who is 67 and still working a day job in metal manufacturing, as he stood alongside the barns one sunny morning last month. “To just walk away from it, to let them fall to disrepair and bulldoze them down, it would be hard.”
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But this summer, with help from a nonprofit group and a leap of faith, the Faaborg farm is in the middle of a noisy, radical transformation. The Faaborgs have traded hogs for mushrooms in an effort to restore balance to the land, and to their lives.
The last of their hogs shipped out in the fall of 2022. Mushrooms for medicinal tinctures and a coffee blend are now being grown in an outbuilding, and a hog barn is being retrofitted to grow specialty mushrooms. Elsewhere on the land, hundreds of native trees have been planted and a pollinator-friendly field has been sown. A sediment-choked creek is set to be restored, and the open lagoon that once held a million gallons of hog waste is being converted into a freshwater pond.
The person driving the changes is Rand Faaborg’s second-oldest son, Tanner Faaborg, 40. He hopes to make his family’s farm a blueprint in the Midwest, to show how people can leave industrial farming, grow environmentally friendly and profitable food, and, in turn, help rebuild hollowed-out communities.
“I want to make rural America a place where people want to live and grow up in,” Tanner Faaborg said. Absent significant changes, he said, the heartland will end up becoming “oneEditors’ Picks

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“That’s not what I want to see,” he said.
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Rand and Tammy Faaborg moved their family from the town of Nevada, Iowa, outside Ames, to the 25-acre farm northeast of Des Moines in 1986, wanting a country life. They lived frugally, growing, canning and freezing their own fruits and vegetables, and making their own clothes. The animals they raised lived in fields and had names.
Shortly after Tanner turned 8, his parents decided to go into the business of running a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, also known as a factory farm. The Faaborgs could take out a loan for no money down to build hog barns. A pork producer would supply thousands of young hogs and feed, and the Faaborgs would raise them and dispose of the manure. The income would supplement the $6 an hour that Rand Faaborg earned as a welder.
“The offer sounded so good, and we had such little money,” Tanner Faaborg said.
It was round-the-clock work. The barns were filled with small pens that each held nearly two dozen hogs, for a total of 1,100 hogs per barn. The animals never went outside. They grew more stressed and aggressive as time went on, knocking over and biting whoever went into the pens to scrape away manure, the Faaborgs said.
Once the hogs reached six months old and 280 pounds each, they were sent to slaughter. Loading them onto waiting trucks took Rand Faaborg and the children all night, and afterward he’d head straight to his day job and the kids went to school. The family would spend the next few days pressure-washing the barns before another 2,200 young hogs would be delivered and the cycle would begin again. They gave vast amounts of manure to crop farmers to fertilize fields.
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Over the years, the communities around the Faaborgs changed. Small farms disappeared as older farmers retired or died and their children moved away. The land was swallowed up by large agricultural companies. Iowa is now home to 4,000 factory farms, more than any other state. It also produces the most animal waste, which generates a significant amount of greenhouse gasses and contaminates waterways. After torrential downpours this past spring and summer, environmentalists warned of floodwaters carrying untreated animal waste, which they called “fecal soup.”
“I don’t think people really understand the extent of that growth and the negative impact that it’s had on our rural communities,” Tanner Faaborg said. “There’s been population declines, small towns in Iowa are dying. With consolidation comes efficiencies, but at what cost?”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/climate/hog-farm-iowa-rewild.html

 

[cigaretteman]

Tanner Faaborg never thought he’d return to the farm. He attended the University of Iowa and spent three years traveling the world before he returned to Des Moines to lead Urban Ambassadors, a nonprofit organization that created a climate action and adaptation plan for the city and plants trees and holds trash cleanups.
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In 2016, Tanner Faaborg persuaded his parents to install solar panels that ended up powering everything on the farm, including the hog buildings. The extra energy fed into the electric grid, so instead of paying electric bills, the Faaborgs collected checks from the utility. Rand Faaborg was so impressed that when his old car conked out, he bought an electric Nissan Leaf. “My commute was all on sunlight for the last ten years,” he said.
By 2020, the economics of agricultural consolidation had taken their toll on the farm. Rand Faaborg once earned a reliable annual income from the hogs, despite loan payments on the barns. But by then, profit had shrunk to less than $15,000 a year.
In the meantime, Tanner Faaborg was searching for ways to help his parents leave hog farming without losing their investment in the barns. He connected with the Transfarmation Project, an initiative run by the farm-animal welfare charity Mercy for Animals that helps people transition out of industrial animal agriculture and into growing specialty crops. Out of the replacement crops they suggested, Tanner Faaborg seized on mushrooms, intrigued by their potential to heal ailments and serve as a superfood.
He first had to convince his parents. Until that point, Rand Faaborg’s consumption of fungi had largely been limited to the occasional can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup.
“It was foreign to us,” Rand Faaborg said. “It’s like most things. You don’t know what you don’t know.”
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But the more Tanner Faaborg researched mushrooms, the more excited he grew, especially after Transfarmation connected him with a grower in upstate New York, Steve Gabriel, that he calls his “mushroom guru.” Over the next two years, he convinced not only his parents, but his older brother, Tyler, who himself had spent decades raising hogs and was suffering from bad shoulders and knees after hauling dozens of dead animals out of pens each day.
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Tyler Whitley, the director of the Transfarmation Project, describes himself as a “farmer social worker.” His group talks to farmers, learns about their equipment and buildings and whether it’s tied to debt, explores what plant-based alternatives might work, and matches them with resources.
Transfarmation awarded the Faaborgs a $15,000 grant for a pilot project cultivating reishi, lion’s mane and oyster mushrooms inside tents in one of the farm’s outbuildings. It provided another $200,000 toward redesigning and converting one of the Faaborgs’ hog barns, Mr. Whitley said.
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Mr. Whitley said that of the hundreds of farmers that have reached out, his team was working with 12 farms, seven of which have successfully transitioned out of factory farming, including the Faaborgs. Most of the farmers it has helped raised hogs or chickens on an industrial level using the same style of animal confinement. That uniformity enables the nonprofit group to offer blueprints for repurposing animal barns, Mr. Whitley said.
“We try to bring a systemization to it so it’s scalable,” he said.
Still, any transition to specialty farming is a risk. Tanner and Tyler have started selling medicinal tinctures, and coffee and salt flavored with mushrooms under the name 1100 Farm, a nod to the number of hogs each barn once held. But they need to secure buyers for thousands of pounds of fresh, specialty mushrooms they expect to produce each week.
Tanner Faaborg sold his house in Des Moines to help pay for the project, secured a government grant to convert the swine pit to a clean pond, and Tyler Faaborg contributed $75,000 from savings. They’re still a few hundred thousand dollars short of the approximately $1 million it will cost to fully transition and rewild the farm, Tanner Faaborg said.
“It’s a massive gamble, but we think it’s worth it,” he said.
If all goes well, the profits from mushrooms could exceed what the farm was generating from hogs during the best of times, without the backbreaking work and sounds and smells from the hog barns and waste pit. 1100 Farm is in the process of buying the land and buildings from Rand and Tammy Faaborg. “That’s a big part of their retirement plan,” Tanner Faaborg said.
In the meantime, Rand Faaborg has become a mushroom convert. He says the mushroom tinctures helped restore his sense of taste and smell, which he’d mysteriously lost a decade earlier. And Tammy, his wife, now cooks mushrooms in the kitchen and serves them on their hamburgers.
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“It’s been eye-opening,” he said. “It’s been very good.”

 

[Scott559]

Hope it works!