Forest to Fork CEO Dana Anderson has a background in agricultural technology and got his start at Living Greens in town. He helped to build the company out and then switched his focus to mushrooms when he was contacted about a mushroom farm that went out of business in Minneapolis. Anderson spent two years researching mushrooms and opened a pilot farm for Forest to Fork. After success in the pilot farm, Anderson decided to expand to Faribault, leasing space in the former Faribault Foods warehouse.
Starting production in Faribault, Anderson hired farm manager Tanner Sanness to oversee day-to-day operations. Sanness came from a mushroom farm in Iowa because he saw the opportunity that Farm to Fork offered in terms of innovation in the industry.
With the technology Anderson has created, he reduces labor and the number of steps needed when filling the mushroom-growing bags.
"Once we fill our bags, we're done," Anderson said. "[Other farms] have to load a cart, fold the bag a special way, put them into an autoclave, pull them out of the autoclave, put them into a laboratory, inoculate them, and put them back on the cart. All those steps are things we don't have to do because our bag filling is done in the clean room at the same time we're inoculating right under the bag filling system. So it saves two-thirds of the labor to make the bags."
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