19 ms·
Sonoma County farm strikes black truffle gold after 9 years of waiting
- jdhn 5y agoThe article says that we're still not sure how the fruit reproduces. With all this money on the line, how is it that nobody has figured this out?
- fhe 5y agoit's actually not that much money -- a few hundred million dollars for world wide market? also it seems a fairly inelastic market, i.e. if price drops to 1/5 it's current price, demand won't go up any where near 5x, so current suppliers have little incentive to increase supply or lower cost.
- jdavis703 5y agoUnless it’s patentable, there’s no economic incentive for any one farmer or farm conglomerate to invest in this research. It would require government or non-profit research. And in a world of scarce resources, funding research on a luxury food item would strike many as a waste of taxes or philanthropic funds. (I’m not saying it’s wasteful, learning the secrets of truffle reproduction could unlock a new branch of scientific study. Just explaining why this is.)
- Cerium 5y agoThere is incentive to discover but not to share.
- MattGaiser 5y agoJust make it a trade secret? A patent is basically making it public in exchange for a guaranteed, albeit short term, exclusive right. Why not just let only a few know and keep it secret from everyone else?
- lumost 5y agoPeople talk, if it’s not patentable it would be pretty hard to prove that one of the salaried researchers new truffle farm business is a trade secret.
- 1123581321 5y agoThat would be an easy criminal case. Trade secrets arguably are better protected by the law than patents for certain types of knowledge.
- ksdale 5y agoLots of businesses have successfully kept trade secrets for decades, many very famous and gigantic company's recipes are trade secrets. Companies know that if they patent it, it will be in the public domain eventually, whereas trade secrets can stay secret indefinitely, theoretically.
- anamax 5y agoGoreTex and Coke are still secrets.
- lumost 5y agoThe vast number of off brand cola and waterproof fabric products would seem to imply that marketing is the operative force rather than the secret recipe.
- quickthrower2 5y agoKnock off Coke that tastes just as good would surely hit at it’s dominance - you’d end up with a levelled playing field more like wine is.
- joebob42 5y agoMeh, I don't think I agree that they don't taste just as good (at least some of them). Really feels like it's just marketing.
- pkaye 5y agoSonoma county is right next to US Davis which is big on agriculture research.
- ProjectArcturis 5y agoWhoever invents a pill that makes your penis bigger will be a trillionaire. How is it that nobody has figured that out?
- tubby12345 5y agothis is like some kind of reverse occam's razor argument but i feel like your point is blunted by the fact that there are lots of companies making tons of money off of viagra derivatives.
- voltagedivider 5y agoViagra doesn't make your penis bigger; it temporarily alleviates erectile dysfunction.
- tubby12345 5y agoI know how Viagra works. Do you know what the word blunted means?
- voltagedivider 5y ago> Do you know what the word blunted means? I know of blunt statements and blunt/blunted knife blades but maybe I misunderstood your usage of the word. Care to explain?
- MattGaiser 5y agoTruffles do reproduce. So it is not a question of if it is possible, but merely how an observable phenomenon occurs. There are no penis enlargement pills yet beyond viagra and one of the problems is that there is no proof that anything drug can extend tissue in that way.
- version_five 5y ago"I've ordered products like this before, wasted a pretty penny I don't mind telling you. But if this works, I'll order a dozen. We're not selling penis mightiers Well you're sitting on a goldmine Trebek" It's not clear to me this is true. I think there may be some niche market, but I think most men wouldn't even consider something like this. A few people mentioned viagra, which has made a lot of money, but that's not about size. I remember reading a long time ago that there is some kind of "enlargement" surgery available, but that the motivation is almost exclusively the "locker room" rather than a sexual issue. Anyway, I'm sure that an invention as you describe may be interesting to some niche, but I don't believe it's one of the worlds burning problems, which is why it hasn't had any serious study.
- umvi 5y agoMushrooms can be super fickle - the conditions under which a spore will grow depend on soil composition, acidity, temperature, and other things. Morels are also famously hard to farm. Most people just hunt for them after forest fires.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cwkoss 5y agoIt's probably very hard to measure truffle mycelium growth: its fragile and buried under very heterogenous dirt. And mycelium is the form this organism takes the majority of the time: the fruit is just the end product. It'd be like trying to understand how plants grow without being able to see or measure light.
- cwkoss 5y agoFun fact: up to 30% of soil carbon is glomalin - it's a fungal byproduct which is very important to soil health. We only discovered these proteins in 1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomalin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomalin
- tsimionescu 5y agoAccording to that article, we know this protein exists, but we have never actually been able to isolate and study it directly - we just see some derived substances. Fascinating how such basic things are still somewhat mysterious; and how it's easier to create antibodies to detect byproducts of a protein than it is to chemically isolate that protein!
- entangledqubit 5y agoWhile not the same as the full mechanism for reproduction. The cultivation section of the relevant Wikipedia article claims that there was significant large scale cultivation of the truffle in France at the end of the 19th century -- and that many of the techniques were later lost.
- phkahler 5y ago>> The article says that we're still not sure how the fruit reproduces. And when they got one, they ate it. I would have thought maybe breaking it up and I dunno, planting it or spreading it around might be a good idea.
- Bud 5y agoIt'd be nice if it worked that way, but it doesn't...otherwise they'd have just started it that way from the beginning.
- pvaldes 5y agoThat would be antieconomic. Culturing a truffe means buying a tree that cames "pre-configured" in a lab and letting it grow. This young sapling would cost, lets say, 80$. Thus they would be burying 1000$ for a lottery ticket with a small chance of turning it into a new 80$ tree. Very bad idea. Anybody can buy a pre-seeded tree online. Eating the truffe instead is advertisement and creating a net of future exigent customers. For chefs is also an opportunity to verify that you have exactly the right stuff. There are other types of truffe that grow in Corylus and have a much lower market value.
- krisoft 5y agoWe do know how truffles reproduce. It's on wikipedia [1] "Because truffle fungi produce their sexual fruiting bodies under ground, spores cannot be spread by wind and water. Therefore, nearly all truffles depend on mycophagous animal vectors for spore dispersal." The truffle is full of spores. Because it is underground it can only spread far if something or someone digs it up and tries to eat it. "When the ascospores are fully developed, the truffle begin to exude volatile compounds that serve to attract animal vectors." The truffle smells good so something or someone finds it and digs it up. The trick is that humans only care about a few species of mushrooms as truffles. You spread the spores of one of these good species around the roots of a tree sapling you plant and then you hope that it will establish a good healthy colony. If for any reason some other mushroom species outcompetes your truffle species you won't have any truffles. And it takes multiple years to know if that happened or not. So any experimentation in finding the right method or the right conditions to promote the truffle species and discourage the other species goes at a snail's pace. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle#Ecology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle#Ecology
- s1artibartfast 5y agoThere are degrees to how, and much is still unknown. As you point out, much of the unknown how relates to propagation and symbiotic bonding to the host trees and soil biology.
- krisoft 5y agoYou are very right. I choose to pursue other mysteries in my time here on Earth, but it would be so exciting getting to know everything there is to know about the mycorrhiza. Even just reading the literature to learn what others already know would take a long time. Sometimes I feel life is too short. Ps: Excelent work on the fjords, they turned out really pretty.
- krisoft 5y agoIf someone would want to invest a crazy amount of money to accelerate this discovery process I can imagine two things we could do: (don’t do it, it is a bad idea) - we could make a genetically modified truffle fungi which glows in the dark. Now, why would that help? The problem with monitoring the health of your fungi is that most of the body mass of it is in the form of tiny thread like stuff called mycelium. Even if you take a soil sample it is kinda hard to tell the mycelium of the right species apart from the wrong ones. With some species experts can tell them apart under microscope but the only sure way to tell what fungi’s mycelium you are looking at is to DNA sequence it. Which is expensive thus rarelly done. But if you could make your target specie glow under UV light it would make the analysis that much simpler and cheaper. So we could do it more often and thus learn about what factors favour our truffle faster. - The other option would be to engineer a kind of “immune system” to our truffle species. Basically to make “nanobots” which leave our truffle but kill other fungi. Now how on earth would one do something like that? I would start by trying to modify mycoviruses (the kind of viruses which attack fungi). Many of them are already quite picky about what kind of fungi they infect, so probably that would help us. Bonus points if we can engineer the virus such that it dies out in nature after a few rounds of reproduction so we can minimize the chances of an escape. Of course both of these ideas are very speculative, scifi level conceptual stuff. :)
- johnba1 5y agoThey break it down per ounce. I was fed "truffle butter" but it turned out to be the opposite of my expectations.There was a whole bunch of cannabis in there, and I was pissed. Not good
- seattle_spring 5y agoI'm sorry but I laughed out loud at your comment. How did you find yourself in that situation? Who presented the butter to you?
- bobthepanda 5y agoFood is devilishly complicated. Vanilla was not successfully pollinated by humans until 1841, which meant that it did not grow outside of the natural range of its pollinator in Mexico (and only a very small region of Mexico.) And today most vanilla does not come from vanilla beans but is synthesized from petrochemicals, because vanilla's pollination is still ridiculously expensive. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bittersweet-story-vanilla-180962757/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bittersweet-st...
- umvi 5y ago> Weighing 5.2 ounces, ... [the type of truffle] frequently sells at prices that range from $800 to more than $1,000 a pound. So he planted an orchard of trees containing truffle spores, waited 9 years, and then found a single $300 truffle. Hopefully he finds more because otherwise that's a very bad ROI (unless he's doing it purely for the flavor/hobby in which case it's a good ROI).
- baud147258 5y agomaybe the trees of the orchard (hazelnut if I read correctly) are also used for their nuts?
- rossdavidh 5y agoI think it is mostly validation of the concept, such that one might expect more in the future?
- tnjm 5y agoYou may have a point. Here in the Périgord, hazelnut trees are reckoned to decline in truffle production when they are around 10 years old. Oaks go on producing for decades. If he's planted solely hazelnut and he's waited nine years, he may have a problem.
- Narkov 5y agoIf that freaks you out, what until you hear about tech start-ups these days!!
- markdown 5y agoAlways sad to see this kind of thing happen, and I feel for the truffle farmers of Périgord, France. Americans are also trying to do the same with kava. Inevitable the native peoples of the world end up in poverty while some Johnny-come-lately capitalist in the US eats their breakfast.
- bpodgursky 5y agoThe world is richer because people took the potato and learned how to grow it all over the world.
- markdown 5y agoOh for sure. But that still leaves the peoples who gave the world the crop (after centuries of selective breeding), living in poverty. Meanwhile, if one of them tries to sell a Mickey Mouse t-shirt they'd get hanged before noon by the US govt doing the bidding of a US megacorp.
- denlekke 5y agodon't worry, the french farmers are also capitalists
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jliptzin 5y agoNobody in France is going to be importing truffles from California when they can buy them locally
- SavantIdiot 5y agofun fact: all french grapes are grown from american root stock [1,2] due to an infestation in the 1960s. one could argue it is a benefit so that if either country is struck with something like this for truffles, they can share. -- [1] https://www.alearned.com/wine/ https://www.alearned.com/wine/ [2] https://gizmodo.com/how-the-great-french-wine-blight-changed-grapes-forever-1691598233 https://gizmodo.com/how-the-great-french-wine-blight-changed...
- car 5y agoThis company partners with landowners to produce truffles: https://www.americantruffle.com https://www.americantruffle.com It was founded by a Stanford scientist.
- bush-bby 5y agoI mean… it’s a great company and awesome idea so I don’t mean to detract. But that website design made me very uncomfortable… I mean right aligned? Really?
- jtmarmon 5y agoIt looks great to me and is centered (i.e not right aligned) to me. Might be CSS not loading for you
- nmstoker 5y agoIt only seems to go wrong on their main page. Look at the page on a wide monitor or with a mobile sideways and i think you'll see the issue: the page is designed to have a left column, which is right aligned so that it goes flush with the picture to the right. But when you view the page on a narrow monitor or with a mobile vertically, below the cut off width it reflows so the right aligned text section goes to the top (which results in the odd layout complained about)
- Ericson2314 5y agohttps://www.americantruffle.com/first-burgundy-truffle-harvest-in-california/ https://www.americantruffle.com/first-burgundy-truffle-harve... mentions a dog named Rico which is probably the same Rico as in the original article!
- supernova87a 5y agoForget truffles -- I want someone to grow some matsutake mushrooms which are just about as legendary/rare as truffles, so I can finally taste some and see what all the hype is about.
- sershe 5y agoYou can collect them in the wild, at least in the mountains around Seattle. We found a bunch at some point... frankly I think they are overrated. What they really need to grow are king boletes ;)
- t3e 5y agoYou can forage for those on the Oregon coast! I was just given some by a friend and they're tasty; had never had them before. But they do smell a bit like gym socks.
- pc86 5y agoThey are mushrooms after all :)
- tormeh 5y agoThe hype is never about much. Exclusive things are exclusive because they are rare, not because they are good.
- reillyse 5y agoAbsolutely incorrect. There are lots of rare things. Rarity by itself is nothing. Something good being rare is something. It might not be the best thing in the world, and something perfectly commonplace might be "better" than it. But rarity + good is the combo that generates hype.
- noah_buddy 5y agoRarity + good !> Common + good. In fact, if you don't care for the social prestige, common and good things are better because they're more easily accessible at better prices.
- encryptluks2 5y agoPeople have figured out how to grow psychedelic mushrooms in mass. Can you not create a large amount of mycelium for truffles and then bury it?
- smiley1437 5y agoSome fungi have very complex relationships with other species before they will produce fruiting bodies and it isn't easy to figure out exactly what they need to thrive. Cubensis happens to be simple.
- raverbashing 5y agoEvolution thrives on technical debt and weird procedures for reproduction advantage See: seeds that only germinate after they're eaten, after they go through a cold spell, etc.
- vintermann 5y agoThe popular psilocybin mushroom types are all saprophytic, they grow on decomposing plant matter or dung. Truffle fungi are mycorrhizal, they form complex symbioses with trees, exchanging water and nutrients with them. Not only does that make them harder to grow, it also makes them a lot more chill about producing fruiting bodies (a.k.a the actual mushroom caps that we eat). Saprophytic fungi need to move on once the matter they grow on runs out of nutrients. Mycorrhizal fungi can live comfortably for decades with their host tree and only produce fruiting bodies when the conditions are optimal.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- benatkin 5y agoI think they should get a Wikipedia page for this, it's too bad Wikipedia has its current notability regime :(
- ur-whale 5y agohttps://archive.is/vrFkM https://archive.is/vrFkM
- aerodog 5y ago5.2 ounces? This is newsworthy? That's like a few hundred bucks of truffle they found after ten years. I appreciate the patience, but what is the promise here?
- ChrisRR 5y agoYeah so about $5000 according to the article. 4 years of 3 hours per walk doesn't seem like a good ROI I thought this article was going to be about they found an entire farm full of them
- aussiegreenie 5y agoIt is similar to a "deep tech" company getting their first product. I know a bloke who spend 14 yrs between getting the special seeds to his first revenue for a specialist cherry. Now he could sell every cherry 10x over but instead charges about $5 per cherry. Speciality agriculture is very long term.
- vasco 5y agoMore of them and more often - but mostly this looks like advertising for the "prepare your land to produce truffles in 10 years" company.
- fragmede 5y agoYou think that's crazy, wait till you see how much a billion lines of code weighs!
- teetertater 5y agoI was wondering too, but I think the point was that it's the first one of (hopefully) many more to come and provides an insight into this style of farming
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dageshi 5y agoI believe Truffles are in high demand in the US but it all has to be imported from Europe. Various farmers around the US have been trying to cultivate them to supply them locally. There's a pretty good video on the subject here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX9Jpg3b90M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX9Jpg3b90M
- jspash 5y agoI have to say that I was extremely disappointed to see the nicely seared steak tartare and microplaned truffle dish sharing the plate with a sad looking piece of "artisan hand-decrusted Wonder Bread™" I remember reading about a baker in California who finally found the secret to a making proper French baguette. But it required something silly like shipping water from France. Here in the UK they still having cracked it.
- DocTomoe 5y agoHaving an artisian breadmaker tradition helps. Over here in Germany, you can have all kinds of baguette-analogues (and some actual baguettes) virtually anywhere, no magic French dihydrogenmonoxide needed. Try it for yourself: Baking bread is easy (and many have taken up the process as a hobby during the pandemic). Youtube is a great teacher of these things.
- jacquesm 5y agoDepressing but true: Dutch supermarket croissants are better than any of the ones I ever ate in France.
- rStar 5y ago
- hanwenn 5y agoMost croissants are factory-made these days, frozen and then baked off on location, both for supermarkets and bakeries (also many French bakeries). Keuringsdienst van Waarde had a good episode on it, https://www.npo3.nl/keuringsdienst-van-waarde/05-09-2019/KN_1709859 https://www.npo3.nl/keuringsdienst-van-waarde/05-09-2019/KN_...
- RealityVoid 5y agoI used to not like bread. I then lived in the us for 3 months and by god, the bread there was atrocious. Now I love bread. We have a lot of good bakeries around and I just love getting a warm crusty bread and chowing on it. I also don't get what the US fascination with decrusting is. The crust is one of the most tastiest parts. I can not for the life of me imagine how you might need water from France for baguettes. I think the limitation in the US is not the water, but the public preference and the way bread is marketed.
- J_cst 5y agoI'm from an area in Italy where truffle is quite common. This year prices are higher due to lower production (climate has been too dry). The quoted price seems high, expecially due to the fact that that's a black truffle.
- gtsnexp 5y agoI find it quite mysterious why white truffles don't grow so well in the Americas. Thoughts anyone?