Leaving Big Pharma for mushroom farming, Wiseman family finds purpose in Worcester
June 7, 2024 | By Cedulie Benoit-Smith | Community News Service
A crop of lion’s mane grows inside the barn at Peaceful Harvest. Photo by Cedulie Benoit-Smith
Chickens moseyed around the yard of Karen and Brian Wiseman’s Worcester house on a warm May afternoon. But the free-range flock is only one piece of the couple’s homestead just down the road from the town center. The focal point of their business, Peaceful Harvest, instead sits inside a humid, metal-lined room in the barn out back: medicinal mushrooms.
The Wisemans grow and process seven species of mushrooms — none of them psychedelic — to turn them into an array of products: powders, tinctures, baggies of dried strips. Some products are blends of species. All of them, the Wisemans say, can boost immune systems, improve memory and energy and spur a range of other healthy body functions. They’re closing in on a decade in business, and their products line the shelves of over 30 co-ops and wellness stores across Vermont — and appear in shops in 10 other states.
“We just want to help and serve others and just help people with their health and their wellness,” said Karen.
She and her husband belong to a wave of mushroom-minded businesses that have opened nationwide in the last decade, part of what’s been termed the Shroom Boom. You can see it in Vermont too, where over a dozen outfits grow and sell mushrooms.
The Wisemans haven’t always lived like this. The homestead is the ever-fruiting result of a move from Dover, New Hampshire, around 12 years ago. The Wisemans moved to Worcester looking for a lifestyle that matched their morals — or, as they might put it, morels.
“We need to get out of this whole corporate world and show up in the world differently and try to be the change we want to see,” Karen remembered thinking.
Brian and Karen Wiseman, owners of Peaceful Harvest Mushrooms in Worcester. Photo by Cedulie Benoit-Smith
The corporate world they left behind had yielded wild success. For nearly 20 years Karen worked as a chemical engineer for a large biopharmaceutical company, while Brian worked in supply chain management. When the couple decided to start their family, they were comfortable financially, Karen said. Brian was able to be a stay at home dad in their large, seacoast house.
But when the Wisemans looked at the world around them at the start of the 2010s, they thought, “Oh, our world is going to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly,” Karen recalled.
“We didn’t want to participate in it anymore,” she said. “We wanted to get closer to the land, and honestly, we want(ed) to raise some chickens.”
So they moved to rural Vermont. They had no grand plans of starting what would become their farm, said Karen. Mushrooms came into the picture as a hobby: Brian had taught himself how to grow the fungi while in New Hampshire.
As they settled in Worcester, the couple wondered what role they could play in their new community, what skills or knowledge they could contribute, Karen said. “We at the time realized nobody was growing mushrooms year-round,” she said.
The metal-lined growing room at Peaceful Harvest Mushrooms in Worcester. Photo by Cedulie Benoit-Smith
So they turned the hobby into a business. The Wisemans found it natural to transfer their skills to the clean, controlled, indoor environments that finicky fungi demand.
Karen completed a three-year certificate in clinical herbalism from the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism, which operates out of Goddard College’s campus in Plainfield. She was skeptical at first, she said, but soon came to appreciate how many ailments could be addressed by natural products, rather than those synthesized in a lab.
Few small-farm families can support the lifestyle without at least one partner doing other work, and the Wisemans are no exception. Karen explained, “I don’t know of any farmers that farm where somebody in the family doesn’t have an off-farm job. Yeah, we can all hope that feeding ourselves and the kinds of work that farmers and agriculture does really becomes a true value to us again, where we value it like all the other garbage in society. But we’re not there yet.”
She works remotely with flexible hours in regulatory and compliance for a medical device manufacturing company. Brian works full time growing mushrooms.
The couple now feels at home in Worcester. In fact, a neighbor helped build a sterile lab in the Wisemans’ home for his senior project with the Central Vermont Career Center.
The Wisemans handle all the steps of the mushroom-growing process at home. With the help of their barn and a second facility just down the street, the Wisemans grow, fruit, inoculate, process and package their mushrooms. Their kids are now old enough to help with the work, but this can be hard between track and theater schedules.
About 65% of Peaceful Harvest’s business is wholesale with local co-ops, said Karen. Hunger Mountain Coop in Montpelier is a proud carrier of Peaceful Harvest mushrooms. The co-op’s wellness manager Crystal Arellano said the market helps local producers get on the shelves even if it means the co-op gets lower profit margins.
“The co-op is serving the community. That’s what we’re here for,” Arellano said. “And for our members, our producers, all of us, this is a center for us to share items. So we want to make sure that those companies have a place here and have a spot. And we also want them to keep their business at the same time. So, being able to highlight their items and give it at a price that’s reasonable for the customer too. It’s nice, because when people come into the store, they can look around and know that a lot of these things are coming from Vermont.”
Brian and Karen Wiseman. Photo by Cedulie Benoit-Smith
The co-op features products from three other mushroom companies, Arellano said, but Peaceful Harvest is the only one to use both mycelium and mushrooms in its goods. Mycelium is to fungi what roots are to plants.
Additionally, Karen uses her training in clinical herbalism to teach in sessions hosted at places like Hunger Mountain. “I think most of us are pretty proud to recommend Peaceful Harvest: One because it’s local, and then two, we know how much thought has gone into each formulation,” Arellano said.
As the small business continues to grow its roots, the family has this to say, according to Karen: “There’s a reason our business is called Peaceful Harvest Mushrooms. We just want a simple, peaceful life that helps other people and that respects the natural world that we get to be a part of.”
Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.
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Correction: Crystal Arellano said the distinction between Peaceful Harvest and other mushroom companies at Hunger Mountain is that the former uses both mushrooms and mycelium in its products.