SARRION.- José Soriano was a child, the hills of Sarrión, Spain, in the arid and cold Spanish province of Teruel, they were largely abandoned, covered in bushes and stones. Today they house enormous oak plantations, under which providential quantities of black truffles grow.
“Here, everything revolves around the truffle (…) It is more than a crop, It’s a way of life,” says this 38-year-old truffle farmer, owner of 30 hectares of land in this small town in eastern Spain, in the region of Aragon, 45 km south of the city of Teruel.
A few years ago, this athletic father of a family left his job as a forestry agent to dedicate himself full time to the trees whose roots, underground, truffles grow, and which were planted 20 years ago by his father-in-law in this town of 1,200 population. It was a choice of the heart but also of the head.
“It was complicated to do both things at the same time,” explains this thirty-year-old, caressing his dog Pista, a four-year-old female shorthaired pointer, trained to track down these coveted mushrooms. “Besides, in the end, with the truffle you earn more.”
In front of him, his dog suddenly stops at the foot of a tree with yellowing leaves. With a knife, José Soriano approaches to help him dig up a truffle five centimeters in diameter. “Sometimes they are larger,” and “they can reach up to half a kilo,” he explains.
First world producer
Following in Sarrión’s wake, the production of “tuber melanosporum” (scientific name for the black truffle) has skyrocketed in Spain in recent years, and the country is now the world’s leading producer of this highly aromatic and prized mushroom. cocina, which can reach prices of up to 1,500 euros ($1,600) per kilo. A blessing for farmers who have embarked on the adventure.
“Here, the land is very poor, not much grows,” explains Daniel Brito, president of the Association of Truffle Collectors and Growers of the Province of Teruel (Atruter). “But paradoxically, the truffle likes that type of soil,” he adds.
According to professionals in the sector, Spain produced about 120 tons of black truffles in 2022, four times more than in Italy (30 tons) and three times more than in France (40 tons), now displaced as the world epicenter of the black diamond.
80% of these 120 tons came from the Sarrión area, the largest truffle region in the world, with 8,000 hectares of plantations. The truffles of this town, which organizes every year an international fair dedicated to this luxury mushroom: “they are exported everywhere,” insists Daniel Brito.
This success is due not only to the use of vast irrigated plots, but also to mycorrhization, a process that consists of grafting the truffle mycelium into the roots of the bushes before planting them, creating a symbiosis between the two. “This allows the fungus to spread to the soil over the years, and if the conditions are good, we have a more important production,” explains Brito.
“Saviour table”
For the people of the area, faced like many areas of inland Spain with depopulation and the exodus to the cities, this success of truffle farming appears like a miracle. “The truffle is a lifeline for those who want to stay here,” says the mayor of Sarrión, Estefanía Doñate.
Before the truffle boom of the 2000s, the town was losing residents due to a lack of jobs and prospects for younger generations. Now it is growing again, to the joy of the town school, which has seen the number of children enrolled skyrocket.
“There is very little unemployment here… What we lack are rather apartments and houses for people who want to live here,” explains the 32-year-old mayor, whose town has a municipal daycare center and a medical center. “The truffle gives life to the town, and we even have tourists,” she says, smiling.
They are reasons to face the future with optimism, even if success is fragile. Truffle farming requires a lot of work and a lot of investment, because the trees do not begin to produce until after ten years, and the truffle is unpredictable, like all mushrooms, recalls Brito.
A caution fueled by climate change, which could spoil things. At the moment: “we managed to stabilize production thanks to irrigation”, but the lack of rain and the increase in temperatures is worrying, because the truffle likes the cold, something that Teruel had in abundance.
Source: AFP
