FIELD JOURNAL
ISSUE 001
NOTES FROM THE FIELD
13 June 2026
4 min read
“The Hair Shed Started Somewhere Around 42… Nobody Warned Me It Was A Gut Thing.”
Three years of trying every shampoo, every serum, every collagen on the shelf, before I figured out the conversation was happening one floor below my scalp.
"I think colostrum has helped with my hair and digestion."
Maddie R.
Verified Customer
The truth that changed my life?
Most Of What You're Feeling After 40 Is Your Gut Barrier Giving Up.
The hair shed, the bloating after meals that never used to bother you, the colds that hang around for ten days instead of four. All of it traces back to one place. And almost nobody who sells you a fix is selling you something that actually goes there.
"It's not a hoax and it's not a miracle. The gut health evidence is the strongest."
Maddie R.
Verified Customer
Here's the part of perimenopause nobody puts on the brochure...
See, we're all prepared for the hot flushes (those at least announce themselves)... But the slow drift of things you didn't think were connected?
They're what get you.
Hair coming out in handfuls like you've never seen before
Meals you've eaten your whole life suddenly sitting uncomfortably
Catching every cold the school sends home, and holding it twice as long
Your skin doing whatever it wants (and never what you want it to)
The crushing fatigue at 3pm that makes you feel like you've aged a decade since last year
And for the longest time, I thought I had FIVE different problems... if you're anything like me, you probably did too.
Then I read enough about my gut to realise I had one.
Your gut lining is a single-cell-thick wall between everything you eat and your bloodstream...
Let me break it down the way I wish someone did for me:
When it's working:
The right molecules pass through. The wrong ones don't. Your immune system gets to spend its energy on the things that actually matter.
When it's NOT working:
(which is most of us by our late 30s. And most of us in a perimenopausal hormonal shift especially!)
The wrong molecules start getting through. Your immune system starts firing at things it shouldn't. The downstream symptoms scatter into what looks like five problems... but they're the same one.
This isn't fringe science.
Look up "leaky gut" and you'll find your way to decades of research yourself. The shorter version?
As we age (and especially as women, around the time our hormones start shifting in our 40s), the lining of our gut gets worn down. And the active compounds our body uses to repair that lining drop off at the same time.
The result?
That five-problems-that-are-actually-one situation I just described.
So here's the part that took me longest to accept.
What gets sold to us, the people actually suffering, as the way to fix all this is mostly "symptom management" stuff...
Shampoo for the hair
Vitamin C for the immune dip
Probiotics for the bloating
Eye cream for the skin
Each of those works on the surface symptom... While the actual root-cause, one floor down, keeps deteriorating.
That root-cause is the gut.
...The compounds that repair it are the active stuff in certain foods, mostly.
And there's exactly ONE food on the planet that's biologically designed to do this repair work at high concentration.
Your body had it on the day you were born.
That's where this whole conversation actually has to start...
What Is Colostrum, Actually?
Okay, the actual thing.
I'm going to explain this the way I wish someone had explained it to me.
(Because I bought capsules from the chemist on my way home from yoga before I read a single label. And that was a waste of forty-three dollars I'd like back.)
Colostrum is the first milk a mammal produces in the first 24 to 72 hours after giving birth.
Not a supplement.
Not an invention.
The actual fluid your body made for you in your first day on the planet. Before your immune system was ready to fend for itself.
It's different from regular milk in three important ways:
1 It's denser
2 It's fattier
3 It's loaded with the molecules a newborn needs to seed an entire immune and digestive system from zero.
Bovine colostrum (which is what you'll find in a jar) carries a near-identical version of those molecules to human colostrum.
Same compounds. Same job. Different mammal.
This isn't a recent discovery and it's not a wellness trend.
It's biology that predates supplement marketing by about 80 million years of mammal evolution.
What's recent is figuring out that the same compounds the calf uses to seed its newborn gut can also help an adult gut that's been worn down.
Which is the part of the story that matters for you and me at 42.
The Three Compounds In Colostrum Doing Most Of The Work Are These.
IGG (IMMUNOGLOBULIN G)
The fancy name for antibodies. They line your gut wall and stop bad stuff from getting through where it shouldn't.
When your gut barrier is leaky, these are the molecules your immune system is missing.
What you might feel:
Less bloating after meals. Steadier digestion. A calmer stomach.
LACTOFERRIN
Think of this one as the manager of the good bacteria in your gut. It tells the helpful bugs to thrive, and the unhelpful ones to back off.
It also helps the cells of your gut lining stay strong.
What you might feel:
Less bloating after meals. Steadier digestion. A calmer stomach.
GROWTH FACTORS
The repair crew. These are the compounds that tell damaged tissue to rebuild itself.
They work on your gut lining first. Then on your skin. Then on your hair follicles and nail beds.
(The actual names are IGF-1 and TGF-beta, in case you ever see them on a label. You don't need to remember them. You just need to know they're the reason colostrum does more than calm your stomach.)
What you might feel:
The hair shed slowing down before you notice it's slowing down. Skin texture shifting. Nails growing in faster.
If you remember one thing from all of this, remember this:
Colostrum doesn't work on your hair or your skin or your immune system directly. It works on your gut.
Everything else comes downstream of that.
Which means the version that actually does the work is the one with:
All three of those compounds in it
At a real dose
From the first milking, when the concentration is highest
And here's where almost every brand on the shelf cuts a corner.
Here's What I Read On Six Labels Before I Started Harvestory.
(I'm not naming brands. Partly because the laws around comparative advertising are a maze. Partly because the issue isn't any one brand. It's what almost the whole category got away with for a long time.)
When you understand the six specs below, the supplement aisle stops being a wall of identical-looking jars.
It becomes a list of one or two brands that publish what's actually in the jar.
And a lot of brands that don't.
These are the six.
DOSE
3G PER SERVING
(Or "3g," if you read labels.)
The research on colostrum looks at doses anywhere from 200 milligrams a day all the way up to 60 grams a day.
Most of the jars on the shelf sit at the very bottom of that range.
The leading brand publishes a 1g serving.
Harvestory is 3g per serving.
That's three times what most of the brands selling you "support your gut" are putting in the scoop.
If you've ever taken a colostrum supplement and thought "I don't think this is doing anything," this is the first place I'd look.
You were probably underdosing it without knowing.
IgG Concentration
25.3% IGG, THIRD-PARTY VERIFIED.
This is the single most useful number to know when you're shopping for colostrum. And almost nobody publishes it.
Quick refresher: IgG = antibodies. It's the heavy-lifting immune molecule in colostrum. The whole reason colostrum can do what it does on your gut starts here.
So:
A higher IgG percentage = more work per scoop.
A jar that doesn't publish its IgG percentage = a brand asking you to trust a thing it won't let you check.
Harvestory's IgG is 25.3% by mass.
That's 750mg of pure IgG in every 3g serving.
Verified by HPLC (the lab method that actually measures it, not a label estimate).
Batch number: TRF-2025061365.
Independent third-party testing.
If a brand won't put a number on this... the number isn't on their side.
Day of Milking
FIRST DAY ONLY.
The colostrum a cow produces on day one is biologically different from what she produces on day two or day three.
By day two:
the concentration of active compounds has already dropped meaningfully.
By day three:
the milk has shifted to something much closer to regular dairy milk.
Most colostrum on the market gets collected across the whole 24-to-72-hour window. Which means days one, two, and three are all blended together in the jar.
The label still says "colostrum" (regulatory definitions allow it). The jar still costs the same.
But the concentration of the molecules you're paying for is much lower than the day-one version.
Harvestory is first-day milking only.
Nothing from day two or day three goes in the jar.
(We give the calf priority on the first day's milk too. That's part of the story we get to shortly.)
Fat Layer
FAT LAYER: KEPT IN
Here's the bit of category practice that took me a long time to find out.
Most brands strip the fat layer out of their colostrum.
Why?
Because fat-stripped powder dissolves into water faster. Less texture. Less mouthfeel. It mixes "cleanly." Customers don't complain about clumping.
The problem?
A meaningful chunk of colostrum's active compounds, the growth factors especially, are in that fat layer.
When you strip the fat...
...you strip out part of the work the colostrum is supposed to do.
Harvestory doesn't strip the fat.
The full-fat version stays in the jar.
The trade-off is that the texture is a little fuller when you mix it.
(More on that shortly aswell. It's a feature, not a bug. But it does take some adjustment if you're used to the stripped version.)
Sourcing
100% US GRASS-FED.
From two family-run Northern California dairies. Cows on pasture, on grass, not in confinement.
Why does this matter past the obvious
Grass-fed cows produce colostrum with a different fat profile and a higher concentration of active compounds than grain-finished cows.
The mechanism is boring: what the cow eats shows up in what the cow produces. But it does show up in the jar.
The sourcing isn't where most brands cut corners. (A lot of imported colostrum is from grass-fed sources too.)
But it's where Harvestory anchors the rest of the standard.
You can't run first-day milking, full-fat preservation, and third-party HPLC testing through an opaque supply chain.
The reason Harvestory can verify all of those is the same reason it's from two specific farms.
10% of net profit returns to those farms
10%
Of net profit. Every year. Reported back to customers twice a year. Written into the brand from day one.
This one isn't a benefit to you, exactly.
It's a thing I think you should know.
The US dairy industry has been collapsing under commodity-milk pricing for fifty years.
USDA numbers:
1970: 648,000 US dairy farms
2022: 24,470
Harvestory's IgG is 25.3% by mass.
The farms still standing are mostly the family-run ones.
If you've ever wondered who actually grows the food you take as a supplement... this is one of the rare cases where the answer is a thing you can verify.
And a thing your subscription helps keep in business.
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If you want the whole thing on one screen, this is it.
I built this table for myself the third time I tried to compare brands.
It's the version I wish I'd had on the day I bought my first jar.
Harvestory vs the rest of the category.
Ten things most colostrum brands publish... or don't.
Dose per serving
IgG % published
Verification source
First-day milking
Fat layer
Solubility
Flavorings
Sourcing
Farms commitment
Independent testing
3g
25.3% (HPLC verified)
Third-party HPLC, COA on file
Yes, exclusively
Kept in (unstripped)
Fuller texture (carrier preserved)
None
100% US grass-fed
10% of net profit
Third-party HPLC + GMP
Most Brands
1g–2g
Not published
None published
Blended across the 72-hour window
Stripped for cold-mix dissolvability
Optimised for cold-mix dissolve
Often added
Often unspecified or imported
None
Rarely third-party published
*Comparison reflects the publishing standards across the consumer colostrum category as of 6/1/26. We update this comparison as the category evolves. We don't name competitors here because we don't have to. The table speaks. If you read enough labels, you'll know which brands are which.
Let me tell you what hit me hardest when I first put this together.
It wasn't the dose gap.
(Although three times the dose for the same money was a thing.)
It was the IgG line.
Almost nobody publishes the IgG percentage.
That single number is the most useful spec a buyer can have.
And it's the spec the category quietly agreed not to compete on.
When one brand finally starts publishing it... verified by an independent lab, batch by batch... the math gets very simple very fast.
"Armra breaks down to $756/lb. So people pay for fancy branding and Joe Rogan ads."
The person who said that wasn't being snide.
They were doing the math.
When you do the math against a verified IgG percentage and a verified dose, you find out very quickly which brands are charging you for actual active content...
...and which brands are charging you for advertising.
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The Texture Note
One thing I want to be straight about, because the first time you mix a jar of Harvestory you'll notice it.
Full-fat, unstripped colostrum doesn't dissolve into water the way fat-stripped powder does.
The texture is fuller
The mouthfeel is closer to whole milk than to a clean-mix protein
There's a small amount of fat that floats on the surface if you let it sit
That's not a defect. That's the fat layer doing what it does.
The fat is part of why the product works.
The texture is the spec showing up in the cup.
If you've ever used a stripped colostrum and wondered why everyone keeps saying it's "just like adding a clean scoop to water," the answer is...
...they stripped the part that was supposed to do half the work.
Harvestory tastes like colostrum.
Stripped colostrum tastes like nothing... because most of what should be in it isn't.
The fix?
Mix it into something with a little body:
A coffee with a splash of milk
A smoothie
A glass of milk
A blender shake works best, but a spoon-stir works fine if you give it twenty seconds
You'll get used to it in about a week.
By the time you do, you'll also start to notice that the version that tastes like something is the version that does something.
Why We Built Harvestory
Founders Clare Beckstrom and Elliott Beckstrom. Northern California.
We grew up on opposite ends of one of the same conversations.
Clare's family farmed dairy in Northern California for three generations.
The dairies still standing within twenty miles of where she grew up are the same families her father worked alongside.
She drank first-day colostrum out of the cooler as a kid. Before she knew that wasn't what most people meant when they said the word.
Elliott came into the family later, by way of marriage.
What he noticed first was how much pressure the dairies were under:
Commodity-milk margins
Fifty-year-old farms closing in single-quarter announcements
Generational handoffs that weren't happening because the next generation couldn't make the numbers work
The colostrum brand was Clare's idea, after her second baby.
She went looking for a supplement that matched what she'd grown up drinking. And she couldn't find it.
So she read six labels.
They were all stripped, blended, underdosed, and silent on where the colostrum came from.
The category had taken what she grew up on and removed most of it.
So we built the version that wasn't there:
The full 3g serving
Fat kept in
First-day milking only
Verified by HPLC, batch by batch
And we wrote the 10% net-profit commitment into the brand on day one.
Because we couldn't see a way to build a colostrum company on the back of these farms without sending real money back to them.
That's the version of the brand.
That's our why.
We hope you try it.
If it isn't right for you, the next section is for you too.
Clare Beckstrom and Elliott Beckstrom
Try Harvestory For 60 Days. If It Isn't Doing What You Hoped, We'll Refund Every Dollar.
Even if the jar is empty. Even if you've used the whole thing. Even if you change your mind on day 59.
Here's the thing about a supplement promise.
Most of them are written by the legal department to keep the company safe.
They're full of conditions:
"You need the original packaging."
"You need to call within fourteen days."
"You can't have used more than two scoops."
"The product needs to be sealed."
What that tells the customer, correctly, is that the company doesn't expect them to be happy. And is hedging against the day they aren't.
We're going to write this one differently.
If you try Harvestory and at any point in the first 60 days you decide it isn't doing what you hoped...
Send us an email.
You don't have to send the jar back.
You don't have to explain why.
You don't have to be polite about it.
You don't have to have a reason at all.
We will refund every dollar you paid us, including shipping.
We won't put you through a script.
We won't ask you to wait three to five business days while someone "reviews your request."
We won't ask you to "give it another month."
We will refund you. And we will apologise that the product didn't land for you.
And we will mean both of those things.
Reason One
The first reason is that we know what most colostrum on the shelf is like.
We know how many of you have already tried two or three other jars. Paid $60 to $90 a month for them. Quietly given up.
We know that asking you to try another one is asking you to spend money on something you have every reason to doubt.
The 60-day, no-conditions refund is the only honest answer to that doubt.
Reason Two
The second reason is that we genuinely think the product works for most people in the cohort it's built for.
The full 3g serving
Fat kept in
First-day milking only
Verified by HPLC, batch by batch
If you take it daily for 60 days and feel nothing, that's information we want to know about. Not avoid.
The refund covers your downside.
Your feedback covers ours.
The arithmetic is simple.
You're not risking $59.99.
You're testing whether what we kept in actually does what we said it does.
If it does:
You'll know by Day 30. And you'll stay subscribed because the difference is the kind of difference you don't unwind.
If it doesn't:
we'll refund you. And you'll have spent $0 and learned something.
There's only one way to find out which one you are.
Clare Beckstrom & Elliott Beckstrom, Founders
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Okay, You've Read The Whole Thing. You Probably Want To Know What To Expect.
I'll tell you what I tell my friends when they ask. Which is the same thing the most honest people on the internet say about colostrum:
It's not a miracle and it's not a hoax.
It's a food that works on gut tissue.
Gut tissue takes time to repair.
The repair happens in stages.
Here's what the stages look like, with no bullshit and no exaggeration.
DAY 7
The stomach starts going quiet.
Most people who notice anything in the first week notice it in their digestion.
The bloating that you used to get after certain meals stops showing up as predictably.
The morning stomach feels a little less reactive.
If you've ever had IBS-ish symptoms or post-meal discomfort that you've learned to work around, this is where they tend to soften first.
You won't see anything on your scalp yet.
You won't see anything on your skin yet.
This is the foundation laying.
"It's the only thing that's helped my IBS. Not a cure, but I am not suffering nearly as much anymore."
DAY 30
The pattern starts showing up everywhere else.
By month one, the gut work has had time to compound.
The downstream stuff starts shifting:
Energy across the day is a little steadier.
The 3pm crash isn't quite where it was.
You may notice that you didn't catch the cold that went around your office.
The hair piece often shows up here for the first time.
Not as regrowth (that takes longer)...
...but as a slowing of the shed.
Less coming out in the shower.
Less coming out on the pillow.
This is also the milestone at which the people who quit colostrum tend to quit it.
The ones who quit at week three or four usually started underdosed (1g or 2g jars), or stripped, or both.
If you're on a real 3g dose with the fat layer intact, week four is when the work starts paying back. Not when it gives up.
"I took it for 6 months and noticed my hair wasn't thinning as much. I have before/after photos. And I didn't get sick as it was winter and everyone around me was sick constantly."
DAY 60
The whole loop closes.
Two months in, the slower-tissue stuff starts showing:
Hair regrowth at the part-line.
Nails that grow faster.
The immune resilience that's been building under the surface for eight weeks is now visible. (You're not getting sick when everyone around you is.)
This is the point at which people stop questioning whether colostrum is doing something.
And start asking whether they want to be on it permanently.
Most subscribers we'd recommend this to land here.
What we tell our family to expect:
By Day 60, the version of yourself you'd forgotten was the baseline... is the version that comes back.
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So That's The Whole Thing
If you've read this far, you're somewhere I was about two years ago.
You have a body that's started doing things you can feel but can't name. And you've worked out that most of what's getting sold to address them is selling you a surface fix on a problem that's one floor down.
The Harvestory Jar Is One Of Maybe Three Answers In The Category That Actually Goes To That Floor.
It's the version I would have bought at 42 if it had existed.
If you try it and at any point in the first 60 days you decide it isn't doing what you hoped...
Clare and Elliott will refund every dollar.
You don't risk anything except the time it takes to find out which one you are.
The link below is the buy box.
Subscribe. (There's no one-time-purchase option, on purpose.) You'll get the first jar in about a week.
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