A former car plant in Elizabeth, South Australia, stacked 43 foot mushroom columns inside its old paint shed, which became step one toward a 500 million dollar parcel hub

The last car rolled off a line in Elizabeth, South Australia, and then the floor went still.

For decades that concrete slab had only ever known steel and paint.

Then crates started arriving that had nothing to do with engines or chassis.

Inside the same walls, something soft and pale began pushing up out of the dark.

The tall clear spans and heavy power supply that once served a car plant sat waiting for a new tenant.

So what made this empty shell such an inviting home for mushrooms instead of metal?

Why a car plant turned out to suit mushrooms

An automotive hall and a mushroom farm sound like opposites, but the part of the Elizabeth site the growers took over was never built for daylight in the first place. The operation moved into a former vehicle painting plant, and the result was described as a vertical farm inside what used to be a car factory paint shed.

Mushrooms do not need sunlight, which makes windowless production bays an advantage rather than a problem. What they do need is tight control of humidity, temperature and airflow, which is far easier in large sealed rooms than under open sky.

A paint shop, already divided into enclosed bays with serious ventilation and power service, starts closer to that than most farm sheds do. So instead of building from bare ground, the operator inherited a shell already wired for industry. The company fitted out growing rooms there and began with a single crop. “We start with white oyster mushrooms, then we will go into shiitake, enoki and king oyster,” chief executive Kenneth King said, in comments to the ABC.

Inside the halls where cars once took shape

Picture the scene against what stood there before. Where car bodies were once sprayed and baked, growers installed tiered beds of fungi, with the design calling for stacked growing columns reaching about 43 feet. Oyster, shiitake, enoki, king oyster and lion’s mane were planned for columns up to that height inside specially designed rooms.

The first stage was modest against the scale of the building around it. It occupied roughly 43,000 square feet, with six growing rooms each around 66 feet long and 20 feet high, a corner of a plant that once held an entire assembly line.

The ambition reached much further still. The expansion was to take about 8.6 acres inside a 73 acre business park that replaced the old factory grounds entirely.

What the mushroom venture actually set out to do

The full plan was unveiled in early 2023, costed at $110 million in Australian dollars. The operator said the completed facility would produce more than 20,000 metric tons of mushrooms and mushroom products a year, roughly 22,000 tons in US measure, and employ 350 full time staff, up from just 31 on site at the time.

Actual early output was far smaller, and the company never hid it. Six growing rooms were to start producing 20 metric tons of mushrooms a week, about 22 tons, before output ramped up toward the annual goal. Within months the farm was supplying fresh oyster mushrooms to 45 Foodland outlets.

The pitch was import substitution rather than novelty. The operation was presented as Australia’s only vertically integrated mushroom plant, handling everything from growing fungi in a lab to turning mushrooms into burgers, in a market where about 85 percent of exotic mushroom supply comes from overseas. What the site proved, at the scale it reached, is that a fully vertically integrated food business could be stood up inside a paint plant.

What the wider site is becoming now

The old factory has kept drawing tenants rather than standing idle. The site is now being redeveloped into a $500 million parcel super hub of about 890,000 square feet, scheduled to open in late 2028. Ground was broken on the project, billed as the postal operator’s biggest single investment in the state.

That hub is a different kind of reuse from a mushroom farm, but it rests on the same qualities, the same clear span, the same loading access, the same power service. It is designed to handle up to 400,000 parcels a day, double the capacity of the existing Adelaide Airport facility, according to trade coverage of the announcement.

Where the story goes from a car plant’s empty shell

A factory floor cycling through uses nobody designed it for is not unique to Elizabeth. Many closed car plants sit idle for years once the line stops, which makes this one worth watching. The reuse logic here is the same one behind a desktop machine that gives old material a second life, only at the scale of a building.

So a shell that keeps attracting food producers, logistics firms and warehousing counts as something of an outlier. It is closer in spirit to improvised reuse than to master planning, like the 820 foot antenna built by an electronics shop owner from whatever was at hand.

None of this was conceived as an ecological showcase. It happened because a vacant industrial shell with the right ceiling height, power supply and loading docks is valuable to almost anyone, mushroom grower or parcel company alike.

Even so, there is something hopeful in watching a plant that built Commodores for decades keep finding new life instead of fading into one more empty industrial ruin.