<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/19/why-iowa-farmers-swapped-pigs-mushrooms>
"As a sixth-generation Iowa farmer, Tanner Faaborg is all too aware that
agricultural traditions are hard to shake. So when he set in motion plans to
change his family’s farm from a livestock operation housing more than 8,000
pigs each year to one that grows lion’s mane and oyster mushrooms, he knew some
of his peers might laugh at him. He just did not necessarily expect his brother
to be chief among them.
“My older brother has worked with pigs his entire adult life, managing about
70,000 of them across five counties,” Faaborg says. “But we got to a point
where he went from laughing at me to saying: well, I guess maybe I’ll quit my
job and help you out.”
“Now he’s the most dedicated,” says Katherine Jernigan, director of the
Transfarmation Project at Mercy for Animals, a non-profit that helped the
Faaborgs make the switch and set up their new business, 1100 Farm. “He’s the
most in tune with which mushrooms are growing well.”
Set up in 2019, the Transfarmation Project works with farms across the US that
want to ditch industrial animal agriculture, which is typically done as
contract work on behalf of big meat companies, and move toward a sustainable,
fully independent business model."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
