Kevin Novak of Flavor Country Farms sells mushrooms to restaurants in the Omaha, Nebraska, area.
Iowa farmers are growing mushrooms in a variety of spaces to meet rising demand for specialty mushroom products
Mushrooms are commonly found in moist, shaded areas – like the forest floor, on the sides of trees, in leaf and compost piles or anywhere else conditions are right.
But increasingly, edible varieties are sprouting on farms across Iowa in basements, garages, renovated hog barns and custom-built facilities as growers see a chance to meet rising demand for a crop whose popularity has surged in recent years.
While mushrooms have long held culinary appeal, interest in their medicinal and health benefits has rapidly grown, according to the Cornell Small Farms Program’s Specialty Mushrooms Project. They’re rich in essential nutrients like selenium and B and D vitamins. Medicinal varieties like reishi and lion’s mane have high levels of bioactive compounds that are thought to reduce inflammation and support brain health, among other benefits.
This interest is reflected in the range of specialty mushroom products showing up in stores – from coffees and teas, to meat alternatives, to medicinal tinctures, to skin care products and more. Farmers have caught onto this demand and are finding ways to replicate the forest floor in a variety of spaces and setups.
Bounty From a Basement
Mike Mahoney, of Rots Bounty in Iowa City, Iowa, converted his garage into a space for growing mushrooms. “It’s like Christmas every morning when I come here,” he says. Mushrooms – which are the fruiting body, or spore-producing phase, of a fungus’ life cycle – can fruit quickly, resulting in overnight changes to the racks of mushroom blocks lining his growing space, offering a new bouquet each day.
Mike started getting serious about growing mushrooms in 2012 and has been through a few iterations of his growing setup since then. His love of mushrooms started long before, though as an art student in northwest England.
He became fascinated with the rainbow of fungi on his woodland walks and eventually began cultivating mushrooms as a hobby. “I think they’re just beautiful,” Mike says. “There’s so many small things that affect their morphology. It’s just a never-ending learning process.”
With the help of PFI member Tyson Allchin, a former mushroom grower from Columbus Junction, Iowa, Mike eventually found a setup that now lets him grow mushrooms full-time.
He produces around 200 pounds of lion’s mane, oyster, maitake, pioppino, chestnut and reishi mushrooms a week. These varieties are considered specialty mushrooms by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The designation applies to any mushroom that’s not part of the Agaricus genus, which includes the familiar white button, crimini and portobello mushrooms. Mike sells his mushrooms directly to consumers at farmers markets, as well as to a few restaurants.
The process of cultivating mushrooms differs from grower to grower but can be broken down into a few basic steps. First, choose a sterile medium and mix it with mushroom spores. Next, allow the spores to colonize the mixture in a warm, dark space. During this phase, you’re waiting for mycelium – the threadlike underground part of a fungus – to grow and spread. Finally, entice mushrooms to grow, called fruiting, by moving the mixture to a different climate-controlled environment.
Mike emphasizes that there is no need to spend a lot of money getting started. He uses what’s available to him, often reusing or recycling materials that may otherwise go to waste. His incubation room is in the basement of an unoccupied house owned by a friend. “It mostly self-regulates the necessary environmental conditions that produce mycelium,” he says. That includes keeping the room relatively dry and around 65 degrees.
Instead of an autoclave, which some mushroom growers prefer for sterilizing their growing medium, Mike uses a repurposed bread proofer – which is basically a temperature-controlled box that also provides humidity. Once his mushroom blocks are prepped and incubated in his friend’s basement, Mike moves them to his own garage, which he converted into a climate-controlled room, to wait for fruiting.
Gourmet Flavor From a Specialty Facility
In Honey Creek, Iowa, on the other side of the state, Kevin Novak grows gourmet mushrooms at Flavor Country Farms. The business, which formally launched in 2018, has grown from a basement space into a custom-designed building designed for efficient workflow.
As a former chef, Kevin knows how to make a process efficient. The space begins with an area to prep substrate, leading to a lab for cultivating spores and inoculating the mushroom blocks. He moves those to a climate-controlled incubation room. From there, the blocks can be wheeled into a space designed for fruiting.
Kevin’s former life as a chef informs his market as well. Looking for a career change, Kevin leaned into his love of gardening and attended a horticulture program in Omaha, Nebraska, where a professor introduced him to the world of mushrooms. He was instantly hooked and began doing market research. “I realized that this area didn’t really have a gourmet mushroom grower,” Kevin says. “That started it, with me growing in a basement, in a little tent.”
He gathered customers “account by account,” starting with his friends’ restaurants. “Now, we do between 40 and 50 restaurants a week,” Kevin says.
He grows oyster, lion’s mane, black pearl and chestnut mushrooms to sell mainly to restaurants in the Omaha area. He’s now working on his newest mushroom hobby: trying to find the secret to growing more elusive varieties, like chanterelles and morels, which are exceptionally hard to grow in captivity.
From Hogs to Fungus
While Kevin built a high-tech space for his mushrooms, in Radcliffe, Iowa, PFI member Tanner Faaborg of 1100 Farm converted an old hog barn into a mushroom production space.
After 30 years of raising hogs, Tanner’s family was looking for the next step for the family farm. Through the support of a nonprofit that works to transition farms from animals to plants (or in this case fungi), Tanner began exploring different business models, with the ultimate goal of retrofitting the existing hog barns on his family’s property.
Many ideas came and went – until he discovered mushrooms and fell in love. “I knew nothing about mushrooms, but then I just couldn’t stop reading about them," he says.
"You can make so many different value-added products, which allows you to have a more national audience. But you can also help localize the food economy by selling fresh mushrooms.”
Around 2024, Tanner started with a small facility in the family’s shop building. He wanted to learn the process before scaling up. Eventually, he was producing around 400 pounds a week in that space. That’s when his brother, Tyler, joined the team and they launched 1100 Farm, selling tinctures, coffee and other mushroom products online to customers across the country. “I thought it was pretty crazy, and it would never work,” Tyler says. “But after a while, the idea sort of grew on me.”
Tanner and Tyler worked together to convert the hog building into a structure suitable for growing mushrooms. The new operation recently began producing its first mushrooms. They’re taking what they learned in the shop and scaling it in the hog barn. Eventually, they will be able to produce an estimated 5,000 pounds of mushrooms per week, mainly for their diversified line of value-added health products.
Though Mike, Kevin and Tanner each have unique operations with different setups and markets, they all share a fascination with mushrooms as a unique specialty crop. They also offer the same advice for anyone looking to grow mushrooms: Just like the tiny spores that sprout a mushroom, “start small.”
