Today Janaury 15th brings me to the mid point of my internship at Aloha Medicinals in Carson City Nevada. Aloha is the largest producer of medicinal mushrooms in the world with thousands of pounds grown and processed daily. They are most noteworthy for their work with Cordyceps sinensis, a fungus which lives in the body of the ghost moth in the Himalyan plateau. The students have been involved in all facets of cultivation here, from inoculation to drying and grinding the product. Surrounded by experts in the fields of taxonomy, cultivation, and spawn production the information and technology brought back to Fungi Ally will be invaluable. We are excited to integrate the knowledge and information Aloha has shared with us at Fungi Ally and look forward to sharing the fruit of this knowledge with the Pioneer Valley Commuity
Aloh, Aloha medicinals!
My name is Elliott Daniel Mason, and I have a dream of becoming a mycologist. I am absolutely fascinated with fungi and wish to further my mycelic knowledge with an internship of possibly an apprenticeship. I am considering another possible position in Tennessee with a much smaller company but for my work in labs there I will be compensated with room and board. I am a poor college student who has had a lot of troubles finding out what degree I had wanted to leave Drake University with in des Moines Iowa, however after entering as a music major, switching to a religion major, I now wish for some time away from academia but not in the sense that I do not wish to learn. Quite the contrary, I wish to further myself through self reflection, privacy, space, and hard work. I am diligent, fun-loving, and a passionate worker. I approach tasks from a unique perspective thinking outside the box as much as I can creating new inventive ways to reach my goals through step by step processing. I love structure but work well independently as long as I have a procedure to follow with as a guide but would love to learn hands on from someone as well, I am very much a Kinesthetic learner but I always have my eyes and ears open to observe as much as I can. I am very interested in working in the field of mycology and hope to spend these next few years working on cultivating, hunting, and overall just anything that has to do with learning about fungi! Its so fascinating to me! I have had a few significant losses in my friends’ families including a loss of a father of a log term girlfriend due to brain cancer, and another friend just recently losing his father suddenly due to pancreatic cancer. I feel mushrooms are a medicine we should not overlook and with the help of fungi we might be able to restore order back to our lovely planet, before we run ourselves out into extinction. I am not only interested in medicinal fungi and their properties but culinary mushrooms and even learning about properties of poisonous mushrooms as a defensive mechanism in order to disperse and live longer in our world’s ecosystems. I am intreged with everything about mycelium, it is just absolutely incredible to me, a delight to eat but even more to learn and grow from/with.
I would love to hear back from you Aloha medicinals and if you might have the availability of a possible internship eventually. Perhaps it would be good for me to get a few years under my belt as far as cultivating goes so I have high hopes to work with this small company for a while but perhaps eventually I could intern for Aloha once I have had a more thorough understanding of fungi. My dream is to eventually be paid to study the subject that I love, regardless if it is field taxonomy, lab research, you name it!
Anxiously awaiting your reply,
One real fun-guys, Elliott Daniel Mason.
Love and light headed your way!