Growing prized truffles in the Great Southern

Adam Wilson from Great Southern Truffles

When it comes to growing prized truffles in the Great Southern, it’s not about the mystique, it’s about the science says Denmark farmer Mark McHenry.

While much is made of the vagaries of growing the rare, expensive, delectable underground fungus, Mark, who grew up on his Denmark parents’ farm, also has a science major background.

And that, he believes, is the key to success when it comes to truffles.

It’s about nurturing the right varieties, using the right host trees, with the right soil conditions, the right balance of minerals and the best climate, he says.

Adam Wilson, Managing Director and founder of Great Southern Truffles, now one of Australia’s biggest players in the truffle market, buys truffles from all over Australia for sale to chefs around the world and has created a range of retail truffle products for restaurants and home cooks to add flavour to their dishes.

Adam agrees with Mark and says the Great Southern has much to offer potential truffle growers, but there is no magic fix.

Up and down the east coast of Australia growers seeded trees with the wrong species of truffle spore, a parasitic variety that out competed the more valuable species and renders the areas where it has been planted useless for growing the more profitable varieties.

But according to Adam, given the right approach, the Great Southern region could rival Manjimup which he says produces more truffles per hectare than anywhere in the world.

“I’m hoping we can at least rival that or hopefully do better in the Great Southern,” he says.

There are opportunities for property owners, but Adam says people need to put the effort in to be able to make truffle growing viable.

“People went into it because they thought it was romantic and growing a truffle can be great fun, but like any agriculture, if you’re not serious it won’t become commercial.”

According to Mark, the Great Southern has an advantage in that there are no competing low-value truffle species, unlike Europe where finding new areas to grow them is challenging because inferior species will produce pathogenic, less tasty truffles potentially colonising host trees.

Mark grew up in Denmark and went to school there and has been running the family farm for around 15 years with his wife Julia. His mum is still on the farm although his father died around eight years ago.

“Because I did a PhD in physics, specialising in renewable energy and sustainable development and was very technology focused, with the farming background, combining the two made a lot of sense.”

Mark had done some development work in African nations with Murdoch University looking at different ways that farming could be done better with more efficient local genetics and a different way of farming for higher values and greater nutrition which is one of the fundamentals in many African countries.

Black Winter Truffles

“It was getting good quality production of good quality foods,” Mark says.

He believes the fundamental issues of growing good food in Africa are the same for growing great truffles in the Great Southern.

“It’s the same with any food production anywhere, if you are taking a European species of vegetables which are basically what we all eat in Australia, you are experimenting constantly.

“Whether it’s what your native soils have in them, you need to do soil tests to find out.

“For example, in this region we are nutrient deficient in selenium and cobalt and until they solved that they couldn’t have dairies here.

“It’s the same with any food you are bringing in from somewhere else.

“We look at Ph in the soil, that’s significant, what native fungus are competitors, what native hosts may or may not be able to be the host tree for this European fungus.”

Just because the truffles are of European origin doesn’t necessarily mean growing conditions are better there for them.

That seems to be the case with the Tuber Borchii white spring truffle which Mark says grows bigger and with more flavour in WA than it does in Europe.

“So sometimes you take something out of its native environment, and it does so much better. The trick is understanding why and how you grow that.”

Mark’s journey with truffles is a recent one and the farm is still some way off harvesting truffles, although they now have several thousand seedlings growing using three species of truffle in close to 100 different experimental batches.

“The science shows us that if you have a highly colonised root system of a seedling it’s almost perfectly correlated to a high-producing truffiere in the field later. If you don’t have very well-colonised roots in the seedling you will have a very low-productive farm later.

“The science of the agronomy is fairly well known but getting a really good colonisation of every single root in that pot is key to getting a highly productive orchard in the field.

“You’ve got to be patient and you have to get all your ducks lined up. There are so many things, you are basically emulating a European environment.

“You also have to pick your species because we’ve got three different species of truffle on multiple hosts and the biggest issue I can see from a food security perspective is you shouldn’t be growing one or two host trees with only one fungus and if you are you shouldn’t only be growing them in a very small geographical location if you are going to have a decent industry.”

Adam and Great Southern Truffles had been looking for somebody in the Great Southern with a green thumb.

The number of trees on Mark’s property piqued his interest. When Mark’s parents bought the farm 1980 it had no trees on it and they set about planting thousands of trees so their sheep could be comfortable.

Among them were oak trees his mum had planted which caught Adam’s eye because oaks are generally used as the host for growing truffles.

Once Adam explained what they were trying to do, and the scientific unknowns behind it all, it fitted well with Mark’s expertise, even though, he says, he had never tried to grow a fungus before.

“We’d always been focused on the tree, but here it’s not the host tree that’s important, it’s making sure the soil and the biome under the ground is suitable for this particular fantastic fungus.”

Mark says there are many trade secrets involved in the growing of truffles and people aren’t sharing the science.

“It’s a shame because there are so many really scientific things that could benefit the whole industry.”

Mark is looking into the different species of truffle that produce in different seasons.

Truffle Hunting

“At the moment all the black winter truffles are just a winter harvest for just a short period so everyone is doing everything in a small window and with the spring truffle and the summer truffle we might be able to extend that out to six to nine months and follow the season down as we do with the wheat harvest,” he says.

Pioneer of the truffle industry in Australia, Adam Wilson says the industry is healthy and growing with more truffles on the way.

He believes the Great Southern has the potential to grow everything and expects to see the region producing more and more truffles.

“With more science and knowledge the time it takes to grow truffles is getting shorter, but when we get to a place where science meets agriculture we’ll have better knowledge on why certain things happen,” Adam says.

“At the moment there’s still not enough science being delivered into the growing of truffles.”

It’s not like growing wheat or barley at the moment where farmers can be reasonably certain of long-term results, but plenty of progress is being made.

Australian truffles are held in high regard in Europe and Adam says the quality is better than the summer truffles marketed by the Italians which Australian truffles are largely competing against.

Great Southern Truffles had its origins in 1997 when truffles were first planted in Western Australia, followed by their first harvest in 2005.

It’s now a leading name in the truffle industry, buying and processing a large percentage of Australia’s truffles, and distributing them to some of the most celebrated chefs in Australia, Europe, Asia, and the USA.

Adam says he fell in love with truffles when he was living in Italy from 1985 to 2000.

“I ate them in a restaurant there with a friend of mine and my toes curled and my stomach just went ‘this is the best thing I’ve ever tasted’ and from then on in I’ve been eating truffles for my whole life.”

The dish was a simple pasta with white truffle.

Adding a touch of truffle to a delicious meal

“It’s the only way to eat it, simple and no competing flavours.”

Great Southern Truffles was the first Australian company accredited with CODEX HACCP to handle and manufacture fresh truffles.

It has developed processes for conserving the great taste of truffles in products so customers can enjoy the truffle taste year-round.

Its product range includes sauce, oil, butter, honey, salsa, foie gras, juice stock, salt, and gift boxes for truffle lovers.