Mushroom Farmer Mallory DeVries: Why She Stopped Farming Despite Success

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Mallory DeVries was growing more specialty mushrooms than she could have imagined. The operation in an adjoining tent to their home was becoming so big that she and her husband realized that they would need outside labor to handle it all. Customers showed up from miles around.

By all accounts, the transition from Indianapolis back to her hometown in rural Northeast Iowa was a success. But DeVries still felt that she had failed in something that she believed in deeply.

“…something just kind of hit me,” she said from her home in Charles City. “And I was just like, look at all that plastic! …What am I… like, just had this moment of, you know, just… what am I doing?”

Mallory DeVries bio:

• Woodside Acres – co-owner (pastured poultry, flowers, and gourmet mushrooms)

• Healthy Harvest of North Iowa and Iowa Food System – Communications Director

• Author – Substack column

• Special Needs Advocate

The plastics came from the used mushroom blocks. But the piled up plastic heaped concerns on her mission of sustainability.

DeVries had long seen herself as part of a sustainable farming movement. But that moment — surrounded by heaps of plastic waste, cleaning grow rooms with chemicals, wearing protective masks — raised questions she couldn’t ignore.

“I started questioning, you know, what is farming? Is this farming?” she said.

Mushroom Farmer Took a Break to Focus on Sustainability

The mushroom farm had been a creative and rewarding venture. “We moved about 2,100 pounds of mushrooms,” she said of their yearly harvest.

Each bag produced roughly 3 pounds, often more. But it came with trade-offs: imported substrates, plastic waste, and a reliance on out-of-state inputs like mushroom spawn and cultures.

Then came external blows. “The LFPA (Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program through the USDA), when that was defunded earlier in the year by the Trump administration… we just kind of gave up,” DeVries said. The loss of that support made the challenges harder to justify.

That program opened markets for local producers who could sell to food pantries, schools, and day care centers.

RELATED: A Kentucky farmer told American Farmland Owner what happened when LFPA funding disappeared after he had previous federal approval to sell his meat and produce to the local school district. 

Family Farmers Decided to Stop Mushroom Farming

She and her husband started having difficult but necessary conversations. “We still had our mushroom operation, our chicken, our poultry operation at that time,” she explained. “We still have this garden that is just neglected. The kids are getting older… like, what are we… what are we doing?”

Eventually, they scaled back. “Right now, we are… we’re basically kind of back to square one where we were, which is growing food for ourselves, and that’s about it right now. Besides our day jobs.”

A Push for More Sustainable Farming

In her day job, DeVries works in communications and writing for nonprofits focused on agriculture and sustainability. It is work that is now enriched and guided by her own experience.

“I’ve been taking kind of a deep dive into the mushroom growers across the state,” she said.

“Trying to figure out how we can kind of help them to work together to make it a more sustainable practice.”

One focus is localization and reducing the reliance on imported materials. “We also were ordering in a lot of our spawn and our cultures from out of state. We’re missing that infrastructure here in the state,” DeVries said.

She hopes to help build that missing network, not only for mushrooms, but for other small-scale or alternative agricultural products.

“How can we make sure that those are sustainable,” she asked, “and we don’t end up replacing corn and beans with another system that is also not helping?”

Lessons from Farming Disappointments

Looking back, DeVries is reflective, but not bitter. “I felt kind of bummed… like, oh, just… here’s something else that just didn’t quite work out,” she admitted. “But it was such a good experience.”

For her, the deeper lesson was about alignment, between values and practice, between product and purpose.

“Once you get into a market… you feel successful, it’s really easy to forget why you started,” she said. “It’s really easy to justify the chemical use… the plastic… luckily, I kind of snapped out of it.”

She doesn’t criticize other mushroom farmers. In fact, she believes strongly in the crop’s potential. “I still think there’s a lot of potential in this industry. And if we’re just importing it from another state, we might as well be doing it here anyway,” she said.

But she hopes more growers will ask themselves tough questions. “When you look at this product, or you eat this, or you’re selling this, how do you feel about it?” DeVries asked.

DeVries doesn’t rule out another try at farming. But she feels that her purpose right now is to cultivate a plan that helps other farmers grow their food in sustainable ways that her farm never quite achieved.