the black truffle season in Spain begins in mid-November and lasts until mid-March. It has been very good in terms of productions, similar to the previous year in many areas and maybe 20% lower in other regions. The problem, as we all expected after seeing the truffle market in the southern hemisphere a few months earlier, has been the prices, because the restaurants and hotels have been half closed.
In addition, the year 2020 affected the storm Gloria, which left 200mm of water at once, leaving the soil of many plantations excessively compact and due to the Covid confinement, many truffle growers could not work/till their farms properly, which has resulted, in several cases, in truffles smaller than expected. And at the beginning of 2021 a new storm arrived, the Filomena with snows and frosts down to -28ºC in central Spain and Teruel, where we have most of the plantations, which made serios damage to the crop. Not only did it freeze many truffles on surface, but thousands of holm oaks have died or have sprung up very weakly this spring.
prices in Spain at wholesale (dirty fruit bodies, not graded so all qualities mixed) for black truffle started at just 100€/kg and end the last week at 480€/kg.
In the next figure you can see prices for the french markets. Note some of them is the retail price instead of whole sale:
Good luck to all truffle growers from down under in this just started season! 💪🏽
all the best,
Marcos S. Morcillo
trufflefarming 