How an American Farm Grows $1,700-Per-Pound White Truffles

Truffles are one of the world’s most valuable crops. These sell for $105.00 per oz, about $1700 per pound. That fuels huge competition for the crop, so much that farms take extreme measures to protect their expert truffle hunters. Where’s the truffle? Where’s the truffle? There are dozens of dogs poisoned every year. There’s a lot of theft off of orchards. All for this, it has a sense of garlic parmesan soy sauce, that umami flavor. Most of the world’s truffles are grown in Europe, but now this 10 acre operation in North Carolina has become the first American farm to grow white truffles at scale, up to 120 lbs Of them per acre. That’s about $200,000. We’ve pulled truffles out of this orchard that in Europe they would immediately go to auction. Here’s how Burwell Farms built an American truffle business and what it takes to harvest the crop each year. The demand is there. If we produced 1000 times more than we do, we would sell every truffle. We got truffles. Cool. All right. It’s hard to know sometimes the difference when you’re dealing with dirt or the truffle, and so you need to know when to keep cleaning and when to stop. Truffles are the fruiting bodies of fungus that grows on tree roots, so they come out of the ground looking like this. After staff clean fresh truffles with cold water, they sort them based on size and quality and remove anything that isn’t edible. When they’re squishy, there’s rot somewhere. It could be in the middle, it could be on the side, and you don’t want that. You want a very hard, firm truffle. Then the farm mixes the scraps into a material called slurry to help grow new truffles, which will take five to seven years to 4. We’re standing in our primary greenhouse. All around us are young, loblolly pine seedlings that are in the process of being inoculated with our truffle fungus, Tuber Borkii. This greenhouse, which cost over $100,000, can grow over 25,000 trees. We sell trees everywhere, from just a single digit number of trees all the way up to thousands of trees at a time. If you’re talking about thousands at a time, that’s a commercial endeavor. A single tree at large volume is about $40. They use loblolly Pines because there are common and fast growing tree. If these weren’t bred to grow truffles, they’d sell for about a dollar. It all comes down to the way Burwell Farms gets truffle spores from slurry onto the tree roots, a so-called inoculation process that the company keeps secret. We can pop one out. All these little projections here are all truffle fungus, all these little corn dog looking things. Truffle fungus when it comes to growing trees, actually doing the inoculations. That’s where some things get proprietary and that’s the part that we keep to ourselves. It took Jeff’s team years and over $1,000,000 to figure out this process. While they expect other truffle farmers might try to replicate it, they would probably need to invest similarly to pull it off. They better have a decade and a lot of resources to get it right. After a year, the trees are ready to be planted in an orchard more than an hour’s drive away. Right now we have 5 orchards. They’re all two acres apiece. So we have 10 planted acres of truffles right now. Only two acres of that 10 is in full blown production stage. So once we get four or five years down the line, we have all 10 cranking. We’ll be humming along at that point, but they require specific conditions to grow properly. You want to be careful at soil testing stage to make sure that the soil is what you want it to be. They spent less than $2000 on the lime they mixed into the soil here to raise its pH, and about the same amount on irrigation systems. These are both upfront costs, but they’ll often add some additional lime each year. But the trees won’t reliably grow truffles for five to seven years because so much goes into the inoculation and early care of those trees. That’s where most of the investment is. We’re already finding truffles in this orchard, just not in the numbers that we will say three years from now there’s 1092 trees on this plot. This is a 2 acre plot and we grow at a density of 546 trees per acre. We get more truffles out of this two acres than probably any other orchard in North America. Throughout the year, about three staff members walk through the orchards to spot truffles that have prematurely sprouted. Last year, this orchard had nearly 2000 flags in different colors based on when truffles were found there. Our staff will cover it with a handful of dirt, or sometimes they’ll use this fabric material to help protect it from insects and from frost. Then, starting around December, the farm brings in trained experts to help hunt the ripe truffles. Let’s go to work hockey on harvest day. Dogs are the most important staff that we have. Good dog, Good dog because they find the right truffles. This is Aki. He came in from Europe. He jumped out of the truck and did exactly this. Aki has been hunting truffles for Burwell Farms since last year. He’s a trained Ligato which sell for seven to 10,000 dollars. Wow, nice truffle. That’s a good sign. Good smell. Maybe 8 oz, 8 ounces of truffle. That’s worth more than $800. A long time ago, pigs were used in Europe to find truffles, and they’re really good at it. The problem with a pig, though, is they want to eat the truffle. The dogs don’t want to eat the truffles, they just want to find them, and then they get a separate food reward that the dogs are perfectly happy with. Good boy. If you don’t train it yourself, getting one is very difficult right now. That’s a big part of what makes them expensive. It’s the little things. You don’t want them to paw the top of a truffle and damage it. The farm has multiple dogs so they can work in shifts, and if a dog were to get sick, the farm would still be able to hunt truffles. Truffle hunting in Europe is so competitive that many dogs have been poisoned. Well, Burwell Farms hasn’t had any issues. It tries to reduce risk by never having two dogs in the same place at the same time. We’ve got barbed wire and, you know, security gates. We don’t advertise exactly where our orchards are. The truffles are placed in paper bags that go into a plastic crate, which staff drive to the cleaning and packaging facility. The chocolaty brown and the white are very distinct. So this is like exactly what you’re looking for. Sometimes no matter how good the dogs are, one will get hit out of the field that’s maybe under ripe or not ready to come out of the field and that would be this one. So see how pale it is after trimming, good truffles are refrigerated until they can be shipped to customers, most of them within a day so that customers receive them within 48 hours. So here the ones labeled shippable hole. Now this is where we know if they’re good truffles or not because you’ll really get that aroma of a truffle, which this is the scent we’re looking for completely. It’s has like a garlic umami aroma. We’re getting out a 2 ounce order and a one ounce order we always go over as well because of shrinkage since they’re sponge like they can release some of their moisture and then they weigh less than you want to make sure they’re getting what they pay for. So 1/4 of an ounce over I think is a fair amount and that is a finished truffle package. This is about to boom. Over the next few decades, you’ll see a lot more American truffles on the market. I would call it a new industry and it’s going to be really exciting.