Mycophilia, p.17
Mycophilia, page 17
In the mid-1980s, Americans imported over 68,000 pounds of fresh truffles from Europe, primarily France. The US Department of Commerce, which compiles truffle import statistics, does not designate what kind of truffle was sold, only the country of origin. But by 2008, French imports had diminished to a mere 60 pounds.
That number may be slightly increased when one considers nonreported truffle sales. It is not illegal for truffle retailers to bring a suitcase of truffles that were paid for in cash at the French truffle markets into the United States, and there is a reason why they might not want to report their importation of European truffles. Since 1999, the USA has enforced a 100 percent tariff on truffles in retaliation for the European Union’s ban on hormone-riddled American beef, a campaign led by the French. China is currently a large on-the-books exporter of their much cheaper and inferior-tasting truffles. Croatia and the Ukraine exported 5,200 and 7,400 pounds of truffles, respectively, in 2008. It is possible they are reselling French truffles. (Italy and France dominate the exportation of prepared truffle products, however, which are not subject to the tariff.) The bulk of European truffle production stays in Europe. Aside from North America, the future of non-European truffles may be in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly Australia, which was set to produce 6,600 pounds in 2011 and has been harvesting since the mid-1990s.
International truffle commerce is expected to exceed $6 billion within the next 20 years, but that’s really a guess. The industry is rife with secrecy and misleading information. True to the hidden nature of the truffle, those who trade in them are unwilling to share specifics, and they like to be paid in cash. Unfortunately, fraud is rampant. Unripe white or gray truffles may be darkened with substances like walnut stain. Products stating they contain truffles may indeed, but the producers take advantage of the mycologically unsavvy by packaging species with no flavor or value.
Last year, I bought a jar of Italian black truffle “carpaccio,” thinly sliced and preserved in oil, for a supergood price. I had a houseguest at the time, the mycologist Bart Buyck. He looked at my jar, then me, like I was an idiot. “I think,” he said in his Belgian accent, “that if I look at those mushrooms with the microscope, they will not be the kind of truffles you think they are.” I tried to talk my way out of total embarrassment. “But I bought the truffles from a reputable guy,” I said. “He said they were great.” Bart shrugged the shrug of someone who absolutely knows better. Later I made a pasta dish with them that was so tasteless I threw out the whole bowl and dumped the remaining truffles as well.
They were likely the inexpensive Chinese truffle, Tuber sinensis or T. indicum (both names apply). They have almost no flavor but look a lot like the Périgord truffle or the mild T. aestivum (also known as T. uncinatum; again, both names apply). Unsuspecting truffle product buyers are easily duped because all these truffles except the white truffle look the same: a black, scaly ball that can vary from the size of a marble to a golf ball.*
There are a variety of Chinese truffles, but the one known in China as the pig snout fungus because it was traditionally used as pig feed and not eaten by humans is a particular problem. Spores of the pig snout (and a few other problematic species) find their way into inoculants for trees and rapidly colonize the roots, potentially displacing native European species. Similarly, truffle orchardists fear that the Chinese truffle could crossbreed (or hybridize or both) with European truffles and possibly undermine the flavor of the native truffles. A kind of fungal xenophobia has taken root, with some advocates of native truffles campaigning to “send those Chinese blacks back where they came from.”
It’s happened in the USA as well. A huge truffle operation in Texas, the T-Bar Ranch, put in 44,000 trees that were supposedly inoculated with Périgord mycelium by the Urbani operation. Years later, the plantation produced only Tuber brumale, whose odor, according to the author Ian Hall, is “similar to tar.” (The mycologist and trufflier Tom Michaels said 1 percent of T. brumale spores are all it takes for you to harvest 100 percent T. brumale truffles.) The entire plantation was abandoned.
There are efforts under way in the United States, and laws are already in effect in Europe, that seek to penalize those who sell Chinese truffles and truffle products as other species, whether intentionally or not. Australia has banned the importation of Chinese truffles altogether. Many truffles look so similar that they have to be examined under a microscope to verify their species, based on spore morphology. Still, exact identification can be tricky, so the Europeans have created a molecular test that can identify the truffle via DNA in about 48 hours—which I think is proof of how seriously the Europeans take their truffles. After all, next-day paternity tests can cost you about $1,000.
I was surprised to learn that Périgord truffles have been cultivated in the States for over 20 years, although the volume has been too small to impact prices or access; and I was very curious to see what a truffle orchard looked like, and what kind of person would invest their time and fortune on this highly speculative agricultural dream. It does sound glamorous to own a truffle orchard, like having a vineyard or growing lavender, but the most basic understanding of mycorrhizal biology is enough to know that growing truffles is a very hard thing to do. A few people have had success, and lots of growers are hoping they’ll get a harvest eventually, but it’s really a tricky proposition.
There are about 300 “serious” truffle orchards in the United States, according to James Trappe, only a few of which are headed up by trained mycologists. But growing truffles is about more than mycology. “It’s a well-established art and science combining mycology and horticulture, and after planting, you should know entomology, nematology, soil science, and prayer,” said the mycologist Mark Miller.
Truffles from southern Europe can be grown in North America in the southern parts of the Midwest, northern parts of the Southeast, parts of the Mid-Atlantic states, and a long strip along the West Coast in California, Oregon, and Washington. Other areas may be suitable, including parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, and southwest British Columbia. The folks who are starting orchards are, according to the mycologist Charles Lefevre of New World Truffieres, the same kind of people who pioneered the wine industry in the USA: professionals looking for a lifestyle change.
American truffles are cultivated in the same way as European truffles. In fact, the American truffle industry started with a Frenchman, François Picart, whose Agri-Truffle was a subsidiary of the French company Agri-Truffe (which licensed the truffle cultivation technology from INRA). During the 1970s and ’80s, Picart sold Périgord-inoculated hazelnut seedlings from a nursery in Santa Rosa, California.*
The pioneering American truffle orchardists bought their hazelnut seedlings from Picart. William Griner, Don Reading, and Bruce Hatch, partners in an orchard in Mendocino, California, and Franklin Garland in Hillsborough, North Carolina, all planted orchards within the first few years of the 1980s. Griner and his partners found their first truffles in 1991, 9½ years after they planted the orchard, and continued to harvest until Griner’s death from pneumonia in 2008. Franklin Garland’s first truffles appeared in 1992, and the orchard produced until 2002, when his hazelnut trees were decimated by eastern filbert blight (filberts and hazelnuts, same thing). Griner was reportedly very secretive about his orchard, and much of his knowledge died with him. Garland, on the other hand, has become active in promoting truffle farming in his state as well as in his own role as the father of North Carolina truffle farming.
Franklin and his wife, Betty, operate Garland Nursery, which sells by-order Périgord-inoculated hazelnut and oak seedlings in the thick woods of North Carolina. In 1980, inspired by a Wall Street Journal article about Picart and the potential profits to be had from truffle farming, Garland planted 500 Agri-Truffle hazelnut seedlings and 250 oaks (although the oaks didn’t survive—Garland says they were ill suited to North Carolina’s climate). Once the orchard got going, Garland says his trees produced about 50 pounds of Périgord truffles a year for a decade. When I made my appointment to visit the nursery, Betty Garland was at her hairdresser’s, and through the sound wall of hair dryers she warned me their place wasn’t so easy to find. Indeed, my rented car’s GPS had me turning down dirt roads and zigzagging through housing developments. When it finally informed me I had reached my destination, there was no sign, and the driveway was a gravel road lined with downed timber and underbrush, the kind of road that, after you’ve driven almost a mile, you start to wonder whether you might be about to get into trouble. But when I arrived, Franklin Garland, a lean, weathered man in overalls, assured me that the incessant honking of my car security system that I was desperately trying to turn off wasn’t annoying at all, and that I was indeed where I wanted to be: a property cut out of the woods, isolated from prying eyes, with the sound of Interstate 40 roaring in the background and large greenhouses plunked near the ranch-style house. As we toured the greenhouses and their occupants (hundreds of skinny hazelnut tree seedlings), and later during a lunch where Franklin served up chopped frozen Périgord truffles in an omelet, he explained that his learning curve, and that of all truffle growers’ for that matter, is in the details. “There was a lot of trial and error,” he said, “but I’ve learned a lot in 30 years.”
During what he likes to call the first generation of American truffle farmers, “plenty of people just stuck the trees in the earth and expected truffles in 8 to 12 years.” But truffles are particular. They prefer soils with a high pH—7.9 to 8.1, about the same pH as an egg—and need lots of water. They need the soil to be a certain temperature at a certain point in their growth, which means access to the right amount of sun. A root colonized with the mycelium, which in the case of the Périgord truffle is composed of superminiscule hyphal threads that even at full maturity are no longer than ½ inch, must meet and engage with other colonized roots in order to merge in a kind of tangle that leads to the formation of a nascent truffle.
The specifics are still unknown, but once the truffle is established, it grows until it reaches, well, a point of maturity, then detaches from the mycelium. “Then it just sits there underground, going through its metabolic changes,” said James Trappe. It developes its spores as a free entity. And of course, if you have truffles, once ripe, they have to be found. Which means dogs have to be trained to sniff them out. The first generation truffle orchardists—around a dozen people from North Carolina, California, and Oregon—figured out a lot, and some have truffles to show for their efforts.
One of the great success stories of cultivated American Périgords is Tennessee Truffles. In the 2006-07 season, Tom Michaels harvested his first Périgords from a 6-year-old hazelnut orchard he’d planted behind his house in Chuckey, Tennessee. (“I can see Davey Crockett’s homestead with my x-ray vision, just beyond a hill,” he said in a phone conversation.)
“When I went to visit him,” sighed Jack Ponticelli, a truffle orchardist from North Carolina, “his fridge was stuffed with truffles. His freezer was stuffed with truffles. The whole house smelled like a gigantic truffle.” Tennessee Truffles claims to be the first truffle orchard to produce commercial quantities of truffles—enough “to pay Uncle Sam.” The amount of truffles Michaels’s 2,500 trees produce varies. In the 2008-09 season, he picked over 200 pounds. “Truffle growing makes you humble,” he said. “We really only control the process during the first year in the nursery. Otherwise, Mother Nature calls the shots.” Michaels doesn’t describe himself as successful because of his techniques but because he is simply a few years ahead of the curve.
There are at least four suppliers of oak and hazelnut seedlings inoculated with Périgord truffle mycelium, but the dominant suppliers are Garland Truffles and New World Truffieres. In 1998, Garland licensed the method for producing inoculated hazelnut seedlings from INRA in France (and eventually produced his own inoculants from truffles he grew on his farm), and he began selling the seedlings. In the beginning, he sold to anyone who wanted them—growers Garland refers to as the second generation—but there was a 50 percent rate of failure due, he said, to maintenance issues, divorce, and so on. In 2004, Garland said, he became more selective about his customers—a group he calls the third generation of truffle growers: entrepreneurial types and those with postretirement ambitions—and took an active interest in their orchards, helping them with planting and irrigation advice and, in some cases, going into business with them. He said he stopped taking small orders for trees, as he believes it takes four trees to support a single truffle. (He recommends about 500 trees per acre—in his opinion, lower density plantings take a longer time to produce.) He also grew hazelnut seedlings with an immunity to eastern filbert blight, which kills trees in 5 to 12 years, just about the time they should start producing truffles. Garland and Betty, a rather formidable woman with tiger-striped hair and a husky Carolina accent, conduct educational presentations for the serious and curious alike, replete with a truffle omelet and champagne, but they don’t share his technology, “although the only people who are capable of industrial espionage in this business are academics.” Yet Garland is clearly proud of what he describes as the small improvements he continues to make on his truffle cultures.
New World Truffieres in Oregon’s Willamette Valley near Eugene was founded by Charles Lefevre in 2000 while he was still a graduate student at Oregon State University pursuing his PhD in mycology. New World Truffieres produces hazelnut and two kinds of oak seedlings inoculated with a variety of their own Périgord truffle spawn strains “in order to maximize strain diversity in the hope that one set of strains might be more adaptable to other soils,” he told me. New World tests all their seedlings for colonized truffle mycelium on the rootstock, and they’ve sold about 100,000 bareroot trees, with their sales trending up. Currently, there are trees from Lefevre’s seedlings growing in California, Idaho, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Oregon, and Washington, but he couldn’t say how many orchards, because “that would depend on what you count as an orchard—I have lots of customers with a couple of trees.”
On the Garland Truffles Web site there is a page called “the Bottom Line.” According to it, 4 to 12 years after planting, an orchard on 1 acre with 500 trees will produce 50 pounds of truffles over a 3-month period annually for about 20 years. At a minimum wholesale price of $300 per pound, that is $15,000 per acre per year. But it’s not those kind of minimum projections that have seduced growers like Jack Ponticelli to go into partnership with Garland. It’s the more generous projections of up to 200 pounds of truffles annually per acre, at $800 per pound—the 2009 wholesale price for Périgords set by the French. The problem, however, is in the waiting, and how long a farmer must wait for truffles is a matter of some dispute in the truffle community.
Jack Ponticelli has the easygoing, free-spirited quality of other balloonists I’ve met (oddly, I know several). He doesn’t bother too much with the science. He sees himself more as a man of the land. His Black Diamond Farm has 15,000 trees of combined hazelnut and oak planted on 30 acres. The 5-year-old orchard nearest the family home looks bushy and untreelike to me, but Jack showed me where the mycelium creates the brûlé, a circle of pale, sandy soil around the base of most of the older trees, where no grass is growing. This impoverished soil has been “burnt,” nutritionally and minerally depleted by the truffle mycelium. It is the telltale sign of the fungus’s presence. “We’re waiting,” he said and gazed at the trees. “Hope it happens soon, because the balloon business is bust.”
It took 6 years for Jane and Rick Morgan Smith of Keep Your Fork Farm (the smallest farm on the tax records in Stokes County, North Carolina) to harvest their first Périgord truffles: 5 pounds in 2006. Like most other orchardists, Jane Smith believes that in the near future many orchards are going to come online. For the Smiths, who are 60 and 65, respectively, the orchard—600 Garland-inoculated trees on 2½ acres—is a postretirement business. Jane thought other farmers would be interested in the orchard, especially considering the hit small tobacco farmers have endured since the tobacco industry meltdown. “We thought we would have lots of inquiries from local farmers, but that has not been the case. They are sitting back and watching.”
But both private and public institutions are doing more than just watching. The North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission is one of three groups that make grants to persons who suffered as a result of the federal government’s settlement with Big Tobacco in 1998, including former tobacco growers. They authorized a $235,000 grant in 2003 to supply 50 farms growing 1 to 20 acres of tobacco with the stock, supplies, and expertise (from Garland) to each plant 200 inoculated truffle trees, part of a program to test the feasibility of new crops to replace tobacco (a medicinal herbs grant was issued as well). Another truffle orchard, a collaborative research project between North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Commerce, is under way. These projects hope to add to the body of knowledge about cultivating truffles.
