Our Story
OUR STORY
Harmonic Mycology was founded in 2015 as a vehicle for our own mycological development and out of the need to make medicinal mushroom products available to the people of South Africa, but mostly just for ourselves at the time.
After I (Peter) had experienced the healing potential of mushrooms in 2011, I was surprised to find there were no good products available on the market and started the long journey to figure out how to cultivate and forage a wide variety of medicinal mushrooms for the production of high quality mushroom products. At the time we were bringing in activated organic mushroom powder from the USA for our first product line. This helped raised enough funds over time to systematically establish our laboratory equipment and cultivation toolkit to better cultivate these mushrooms locally.
The process of sourcing good, viable cultures of the (previously) rare medicinal mushroom species for successful cultivation was extremely difficult and we wasted a lot of time and money on sub-optimal genetics. Something we only realized years after we had gone through many failures. We persisted and 7 years later still have many failures. Mushroom cultivation and Mycology is not for the easily defeated.
I have since grown in my culturing, farming and extraction abilities and have isolated nearly 20 indigenous strains from all around the country and have cultivated many thousands of mushrooms. I have also co-authored a scientific paper describing South Africa's very own indigenous Lions Mane - Hericium opheliea, or "Pom Poms" as we like to call them.
There will be many more in the years to come as we continue to discover the South African myco-biome and all it's untapped potential. We're only just getting started
OUR VISION
Harmonic Mycology continues to unfold as a long-term, multi faceted mycological venture for enhancing the health and vitality of humyn and ecological systems in the modern age.
The first phase of our work was the development and sale of top-quality medicinal mushroom products. These products are designed to fostering greater physical, psychological and spiritual health. Functional fungi can help us find confidence through building biological resilience to stressors and maintain optimal health while navigating through the challenging and uncertain times of the modern era.
The second phase is intended to expand humyn engagement with fungi through building an indigenous culture library of South Africa's native fungi and the teaching of workshops and courses on medicinal mushrooms, fungal ecology and cultivation. Finally, Harmonic Mycology aims to engage more deeply in mycoremediation and mycomaterials, bringing healing to ecosystems and landscapes through the application of mycelial technologies. Further research and development will be devoted to bleeding edge advancements in humyn-fungal relations.
MEET THE TEAM
Peter Herrmann
Amateur mycologist, adventurous mycophile, citizen-scientist, and entrepreneur
I am the founder and co-creator of Harmonic Mycology. The beginning of my journey was mainly dedicated to the development of Harmonic Mycology as a collective. I have since turned my focus to learning and developing different cultivation techniques necessary to grow a variety of functional and medicinal fungi for the production of health products and with hopes to educate, inspire and empower people in the extended community to do the same as a way to create decentralized and collaborative socio-economic networks, improve food security and to gain wider access to the Fungi that can feed us and heal us.
I am deeply driven by my curiosity for the discovery and development of mycelial technologies and the advancement of societal knowledge and the use of Fungi as food, medicine, textiles, building materials and bio-technologies. I believe through establishing a deeper relationship with Fungi and improving methods for understanding their language we are able to develop creative, restorative and sustainable solutions to modern day health problems, whether it be humyn, societal or environmental.
I'm on a mission to acquire as many novel strains as I can to establish and maintain a culture library with the intention to preserve and protect our global myco-diversity and combat potential issues related to deforestation and large-scale overharvest and exploitation of rare Fungi.
My vision for the coming years is to establish a team of like-minded and skilled individuals who share the ethos of building a multi-species, collaborative and cooperative future - mimicking the true nature of Fungi and role they play in all living systems in our universe.
