Peaceful Harvest Mushrooms

KNOW YOUR FARMER. TRUST YOUR MEDICINE MAKER.

Peaceful Harvest is the best of both worlds: they are the farmer and the medicine maker. Karen and Brian Wiseman create unusually potent medicines that benefit from the freshness of Brian’s on-site cultivation and local experts’ wildcrafting, Karen’s rigor as a former chemical engineer and current scholarship in natural medicine, and their shared love of their Vermont family homestead. 

Karen wasn’t always into natural medicine. For many years, she had a successful career as a biopharmaceutical engineer. Her childhood fascination with healing and medicine led to a degree in chemical engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At one point in her career, she worked eighty-to-ninety-hour weeks helping develop the first protease inhibitor for HIV at Merck. Later, she became the manager of the engineering department at a contract biopharmaceutical manufacturer in southern New Hampshire, which is where she and Brian met—he was in supply chain operations at the same company.

Brian and Karen eventually married and had two sons. Perhaps it was having children and seeing more deeply into the future world they were helping to build, or maybe it was the crushing workload combined with the feeling that her original passion for helping and healing was becoming ever more distant from her work—it’s not clear what, exactly, led her and Brian to find the inspiration and courage to make the dramatic change that they did. But in 2011, they took a huge leap and moved to Vermont, where they established a new life as homesteaders. They dreamed of raising chickens, having a big garden, and having space for their kids to roam. And, as cliché as it may sound, they wanted to be the change they wanted to see in the world.

It was a positive move, but Karen was sure that she had let go of her medicine-making dreams for good.

Brian started growing mushrooms as a hobby and found that he both loved it and excelled at it. He and Karen decided to turn it into a small business and began selling mushrooms at local farmers’ markets. But fresh produce is difficult to sell, particularly specialty items like culinary fungi, so the idea of creating value-added products from the mushrooms became appealing. Karen began doing something she loves: research. She was astounded by the amount of clinical evidence showing that Brian’s crops were, in fact, powerful medicines.  

This led Karen into a whole new phase of her vocation as a medicine-maker. She didn’t just research medicinal mushrooms: she became a certified clinical herbalist through the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism, in addition to studying with other people and programs. As she puts it, she’s “slowly unlearning and relearning” after a lifetime of training in Western medical modalities. She has also been able to see how Western medicine-making techniques have actually been built on a foundation of traditional, natural methods of medicine-making—there are many similarities in the methods of extraction, for instance. As Peaceful Harvest progresses and Karen deepens her studies, the Wiseman family has also evolved their sense of health and healing to become increasingly holistic and closer to nature.

Not all mushroom supplements are the same.

 At online shops or conventional drug stores and supermarkets, you might wonder if the mushroom powder in various products was tested for potency, or even for heavy metals, before it made its way into the eye-catching packaging printed with the bombastic health claims that typify more profit- and trend-motivated brands. Mushroom powder might be made from mycelium that wasn’t given enough time to colonize, and therefore is mostly made up of the grain substrate that it was grown in. But regardless of its quality, its addition to a product still allows those health claims to be advertised. This is all to say that there is a spectrum of efficacy and care when it comes to mushroom medicines, and Peaceful Harvest’s tinctures and powders are at the other extreme end of quality. The ingredients in their products are always incredibly, vibrantly alive and fresh, and that life and potency is distilled into powerful formulas that are poured into bottles, jars, and pouches, and stocked on our Co-op’s shelves.

There is research to support the efficacy of both mycelium (which you could think of as the roots of a mushroom) and the fruiting bodies—the part of the mushroom that grows above ground that you would see on the forest floor or our Produce department shelves. The key difference is in the grower: if the grower is reputable, the medicine made from either the fruiting bodies or the mycelium will work. If the grower is aiming for maximum profit versus maximum potency, they might take some shortcuts, and the medicine’s quality will suffer. That’s why testing is important for brands that simply purchase mushroom powder from China or other faraway locales: it’s impossible to tell just from its appearance whether it’s a quality product or not. In the case of Peaceful Harvest’s mushrooms, they don’t need to be tested because they grow the mushrooms or get them from trusted local expert wildcrafters and make the powders and tinctures themselves. Their mushrooms are turned into powders within 24-48 hours of harvesting, which is not typical. Again, freshness and quality are huge factors in efficacy when it comes to mushroom supplements, and Peaceful Harvest is second to none on this front.

Though their processing facility is small, it is FDA-certified, which means it meets the high standards that the federal government has set for all manufacturers of dietary supplements, from the smallest of the small to the biggest of the big. Despite how tiny they are, Karen’s background means that Peaceful Harvest has been able to create a lab that passed their recent FDA inspection with flying colors. Karen feels that, in some ways, it’s unfair to measure manufacturers of any size by the same standards—she suggests that a lighter version of the regulations would be more appropriate for small facilities because many of the risks don’t apply, and it’s so resource-intensive that it’s almost impossible to make it work. But she also understands clearly why the regulations are what they are (because giant pharmaceutical companies do bad things sometimes). She also has much more experience following them than most other makers of their size. The result is that, again, Peaceful Harvest’s medicines are the best of both worlds: guaranteed to be safe and responsibly extracted and formulated, yet made with mushrooms that are grown on a small scale, with care, a few feet away or from wild-harvested mushrooms from nearby forests.

It’s worth noting that many of the bigger mushroom supplement brands, by using powders they buy in bulk from anonymous manufacturers, define themselves as “distributors” of mushroom medicines, which allows them to skirt the regulations and bureaucratic requirements that accompany being registered as a dietary supplement manufacturer. This isn’t to say that none of these companies can be trusted or that all mushroom powders purchased from China, for instance, are low quality; that’s simply not true. However, it does mean that Peaceful Harvest is a very special company that is doing something very different than many other mushroom medicine brands. 

Karen says that natural medicines really shine in prevention. They support our bodies’ natural functions; they are not cures or magic bullets. “Don’t take your health and wellness for granted,” she said; “keep your wellness.” That being said, it does feel like there’s something more exciting than prevention happening when, for instance, you take a healthy dose of cordyceps and feel like your body is flowing with oxygen, as though you just went for a brisk walk, or you try two droppers-full of lion’s mane tincture and breeze through a Thursday crossword puzzle faster than ever. It’s not miraculous; on some level, it’s just science. But Peaceful Harvest’s products allow the science to work to its utmost potential by making their products truly, powerfully, medicinal.

Do your research

Karen Wiseman recommends that, when setting out to determine what mushroom medicine would be right for a particular health issue, it’s important to do your own research! But reading and understanding clinical research is a skill that many of us do not have. 

Here are some recommendations from Karen about how to wade through the ocean of information:

• Read a lot of it, but stay high-level; don’t get stuck in the weeds. 
• Think about the overall structure and function of the study. 
• How was the study conducted? Double-blind placebo control is the current gold standard.
• Focus on a simple, broad health issue/question (“is this study showing that __ is good for __?”) 
• Reading a lot of it will help you get a feel for it, and how to interpret it
• Look for commonalities between studies
• Ask yourself a simple question about the study: did it help the disease or not?
• If you see a study that looks promising, check if there is any other corroborating research
• And don’t discount traditional use. For instance, reishi has been used for literally thousands of years for a number of different issues. That’s valid evidence. 

There is a lot of great information at peacefulharvestmushrooms.com/fungi-files and mushroomreferences.com

Written by Ruth Garbus