Secretive truffle growers keep their booty well hid | Wairarapa News | Local News in Wairarapa

SECOND only to espionage as the world's most mysterious occupation, truffle growing is taking off in Wairarapa.

An industry insider revealed there are at least nine truffle growers in the region, but they like to keep their identities strictly under wraps.

It seems admitting to growing truffles is rather like admitting that you've won $10 million on Lotto ? it's the kind of thing you only want family and close friends to know.

The reason for truffle growers' notorious secretiveness comes down to the sheer value of their crops. Truffles can fetch up to $3500 a kilogram so the potential for a grower who has a hundred or so trees in his truffle orchard ? known in the business as a "truffiere" -? is huge.

Truffles are the fruits of specific varieties of fungi that grow underground, in a symbiotic relationship with tree roots.

They usually grow with oaks and hazelnut trees, but they may also grow with sweet chestnut, some pines and other tree types.

In New Zealand truffles generally fruit between May and August, but growers have to be quick to harvest them as they're ripe for only a matter of days.

They also have to have a well-trained dog that can sniff out the truffle's location. (In France it was traditional to use a pig, but truffle hunters occasionally lost fingers in the tussle to get to the truffle first.)

There are two main varieties of truffle commercially grown in New Zealand ? the Tuber Melanosporum, which produces the Perigord black truffle originally found in the south of France, northern Italy and north-eastern Spain, and the Tuber Borchi, which produces an Italian white truffle called Biancetto.

The industry took off in the late 1980s after Dr Ian Hall ? a mycologist at the Invermay Agricultural Centre near Dunedin ? began growing tree seedlings, which he deliberately infected with the Perigord black truffle fungus.

Since then would-be truffle growers around New Zealand have bought infected seedlings from Crop & Food Research in the hope of making mega dollars.

Truffles have been harvested at various sites in the Bay of Plenty, Gisborne, Paraparamu, North Canterbury, Nelson and Ashburton, but so far none have been harvested in Wairarapa.

The oldest truffle plantations in the region are eight years old, but it can take five to 10 years for the truffle fungi to fruit and even then there's no guarantee that they will fruit at all.

Carolyn Dixon, a field technician with Crop & Food Research, believes Wairarapa is "borderline" in terms of having the right climate conditions for truffle growth.

But she says the region can take heart from Ashburton, where a grower has produced truffle crops two years in a row despite the area being initially considered too cold for truffles to fruit.