Half Hill Farms Specializing in Medicinal Mushroom Extracts

At the risk of starting another debate about

, I mention an announcement that came across the email transom recently and seems pretty fascinating. Half Hill Farm is a small 7-acre USDA Certified Organic farm in Woodbury, Tenn., specializing in apples, blueberries, hops and mushrooms. One of the owners is Christian Grantham,

. Grantham left Short Mountain to concentrate on his own farm, along with his partner Vince Oropesa.

Recently Oropesa's mother was diagnosed with cancer, and the two farmers sought an opportunity to help her out. "Cancer has a way of making you change your priorities and rethink your life routines," said Oropesa. Working with her doctors in Murfreesboro, he and Grantham began providing her with extracts from a native Turkey Tail mushroom as an adjunct therapy to chemo treatments.

Historically, mushrooms have been touted as an herbal therapy for everything from the flu to cancer, and the two began researching extracts. "It was a real wakeup call to pay attention to what was literally growing right under our noses," Grantham added. "Life has a way of doing that, and it's up to us how we respond to that opportunity." According to their email, here's what they discovered:

Turkey Tail (Trametes Versicolor) grows wild throughout Tennessee and the world. The anti-cancer properties of extracted polysaccharides (PSK) and polypeptides (PSP) from Turkey Tail mushrooms are approved cancer drugs in Japan. Private research in America has been limited because pharmaceutical companies cannot patent the results. That has prompted the U.S. government to start funding research. In late 2012, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a $5.4 million grant to study 4-6 gram daily doses of Turkey Tail mushroom extract on stage IV colon and lung cancer. This comes on the heels of promising National Institute of Health (NIH) research on breast cancer. The funding also follows a University of Pennsylvania study showing Turkey Tail mushroom extracts dramatically increases life expectancy for pets with cancer.

"The NIH studies alone showing enhanced Natural Killer (NK) cells and reduced tumor growth in breast cancer patients was enough for us to immediately start Vince's mother on Turkey Tails," Grantham said.

Since creating their mushroom extracts, Oropesa and Grantham have found other patients quite interested in trying their products. "We take our extracts everyday," Grantham said. "We do Turkey Tail in our morning coffee and Reishi in our evening tea. We're not doctors, so we try not to talk about how we feel because we don't want to sound crazy, but it is turning into a lifelong routine for us."

To make the extract, Oropesa and Grantham subject dried mushrooms to a hot water and alcohol extraction process that takes a month to complete, resulting in a concentrated elixir to mix into food or drink. Taking a page from medicinal marijuana procedures, they are starting to infuse their extracts into food with a chocolate version coming out soon.

"Most people who aren't sick don't quiet understand what to do with our extracts, and that's OK," Oropesa said. "But everybody understands chocolate, and most eat them before we have a chance to tell them how good it is for them."

Half Hill Farm will offer Spring and Fall workshops on growing your own edible and medicinal mushrooms on oak logs as well as how to make your own extracts. Their mushroom extracts and infused chocolates will be available at their online store.