From The Economist, August 15:
Teruel has replaced France’s Périgord atop the mushroom charts
AS A CHILD, Manolo Doñate often saw strange men with dogs in the mountains near his house in Sarrión, a town in the Teruel province of Aragón. They were hunting the abundant wild truffles. In the 1980s, while visiting a plantation in France, he decided to become the first in Teruel to cultivate truffle-producing oak trees.
“People thought he was crazy,” says Simona, his daughter. Little was known about how to farm the fungus; it takes around ten years for the trees to produce. But it worked. Today Teruel is the world’s biggest producer of Tuber melanosporum, the prince of black truffles. Last year the region exported more than 26,000kg of them.
Production from France’s Périgord region, previously the biggest producer, has plummeted over the past century, as farmers switched to easier crops. (Truffle farmers must introduce the fungus to the trees and replant each one in a field; when they produce, finding them requires trained animals.) But Teruel’s meagre soil is unfit for most crops, so locals have bet everything on the black diamonds. Production has enriched farmers: black truffles fetch up to €700 ($770) per kilogram. And it has halted depopulation: Sarrión’s population has held steady even as Aragón’s has fallen....
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