NPR · 13 hours ago

This Farm Raised Hogs for slaughter. Now It's Growing Mushrooms Instead

On a central Iowa farm that once confined thousands of hogs, fog now rolls over shelves of sprouting lion's mane mushrooms - a transformation that began not with ideology, but with exhaustion, debt, and a family honest enough to ask what else might be possible. The Faaborgs spent decades inside an industrial system that Rand Faaborg entered simply because he saw an ad in the paper, and that his son Tanner quietly endured while working on climate policy in Des Moines, "living a double life that I felt terrible about." What this story reveals is how change rarely arrives as a dramatic break from the past - it arrives when people stop defending sunk costs and start asking better questions of the infrastructure they already have. Where a manure pit once kept Rand up at night, his grandchildren now catch frogs, and he calls it "probably my favorite part of it all." The Faaborgs didn't set out to prove a point; they set out to find a way to live with themselves, and in doing so became a proof of concept for others still searching for theirs.