Business Is Mushrooming in Mendocino County
Over two hours, three times a day, precisely on schedule, on a full stomach.
A novice picker and single mother named Velasquez, acknowledged that spending an afternoon working like a dog for a few of the aromatic, apricot-flavored golden mushrooms that will sell for $11 a pound in upscale Bay Area markets is no way to get rich.
“But the economy up here is awful, and you have to do what you can,” she said. Besides, “I enjoy being outside.”
When the marijuana harvest ends in October and the rains come, Mendocino County’s other major forest industry--the legal one--wild mushrooming, begins. Hundreds like Velasquez are out in the woods, hunting for valuable fungi.
For a laid-off timber feller like Doug, (“no last name, please”), “It pays for the gas, and some days you might make wages at it. I’ve got this secret place I go. It’s sort of like a hobby.”
The wild mushroom business is secretive, unregulated and chancy because of market volatility and the perishability of the crop. It’s also so competitive that friction among pickers can escalate into confrontation and, occasionally, violence. In Oregon, a California woman was killed and three men wounded in shootings at mushroom camps in the Deschutes National Forest, where pickers were hunting the valuable matsutakes.
It’s a cash business. Pickers are independent contractors who shop prices among buyers, most of whom keep a firearm handy.
But in Mendocino County, at the southern edge of the wild mushroom circuit, “shrooming “ has developed over the past decade into a comparatively benign cottage industry that runs on renewable resource.
“People get along up here,” said Joan Evans, a veteran buyer on the year-round mushroom circuit. “There’s plenty of woods. It’s just a question of how far you’re willing to walk to work.”
“In all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve heard of one, maybe two stickups,” said Eric Schramm, a former forest ranger and police officer who owns Mendocino Mushrooms and is generally regarded as one of the founders of the local wild mushroom industry.
It was Schramm who in 1983 discovered the presence of the prized matsutake mushroom in the county. As the word spread, the pickers started arriving.
“Build a buying station and they will come,” quipped Schramm, who is now just one of seven buyers operating between Fort Bragg and Willits. The principal commercial species now being bought are matsutake, chanterelle, bolete, or porcini, and hedgehog mushrooms. In the spring, gathering action shifts to the Sierra Nevada, when the morel “flush” begins.
“I own my own business, but the mushrooms tell me where to go,” said Schramm, a self-taught mycologist who spends about five months a year buying mushrooms in the Sierra, Oregon and Washington. “Mushrooms aren’t a job. They’re a way of life.”
Schramm bemoans a “fungophobic” America even as he proselytizes for mushrooms. The growing popularity of wild mushrooms in Northern California restaurants, such as Cafe Beaujolais in Mendocino, is attributable in part to his missionary work. Schramm’s disdain for the plain white mushroom found in American supermarkets is profound.
“Safeway agraricus is the most horrible of all the mushrooms. Easy to grow and absolutely tasteless,” he says.
Evans grins when she says that “I may have ruined things by coming into town and paying $40 a pound for No. 1 matsutakes.” But the fact is that when the market is hot, matsutakes wholesale for more than $100 a pound, and some pickers go armed.
“This time of year, it’s all I’ll pick,” said Mike Stillwell, a carpenter, after delivering $136 worth of matsutakes of varying grades--there are six--to Evans. It takes a keen eye to find matsutakes, the best of which are concealed beneath forest duff, discernible only by slight rises called “mushrumps.”
Japan is the principal market for matsutakes. The world price is set at Japanese auctions.
Distribution is a problem. “This is one of the most difficult and expensive ways to make a living,” said Will Joseph, an Oregon-based buyer who has set up a station outside Fort Bragg.
Buyers estimate that about 200 pickers are now combing the Mendocino County forest, with local pickers predominating in and around Fort Bragg, and professionals, many of them Southeast Asians, working out of Willits, where they occupy entire motels.
Joseph believes that the industry has topped out, because “the next generation of Southeast Asians is going to college,” instead of picking.
Wild mushrooms were a $41-million crop in the Pacific Northwest in 1994, the last year for which such records are compiled; California keeps no records.
“Ten or 15 years ago, we were existing as a small group in a sea of fungophobia,” said Bob Gorman of the 1,000-member Mycological Society of San Francisco. “We kind of had the run of the resource. So a lot of the old guard who had experienced that fungal treasure trove and was rolling in the glory of the resource became very bitter,” he said.
According to Schramm, not one case of poisoning has been traced to the commercial wild mushroom industry.
But Teresa Sholars, a biologist and ecologist who teaches at Redwood Community College in Ukiah, believes that some sort of certification for mushroom pickers should be required as a safety measure.
“Up here it’s pretty self-regulating, and local chefs have taken it on themselves to become educated about mushrooms,” Sholars said. But “it’s going to be regulated eventually. Nobody pays attention until somebody gets hurt, and then politics take over.”
