Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 25, 1993 TAG: 9305250043
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: GRANTS PASS, ORE. LENGTH: Medium
"It won't replace timber, but it will stand pretty tall," said Richard Zabel, head of the Western Forestry and Conservation Association in Portland, Ore. "But it's still a real underground industry, so no one knows the size of it yet."
Oregon's wild mushroom harvest, which state agriculture officials reckon was worth about $35 million last year, has been growing at an annual clip of 12 percent since 1987.
Mushrooms are the most valuable of hundreds of commercially coveted species that grow in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Others include salal and sword fern, used for floral arrangements, and princes pine, for flavoring soft drinks.
Jerry Larson, international trade manager for the Oregon Department of Agriculture, acknowledges his numbers on wild mushrooms are soft. It's a cash business, pickers and buyers are secretive, and agencies such as the Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management don't count the mushrooms taken from land under their jurisdiction.
The Old West may be undergoing somewhat of a revival in the old-growth forests. As the asking price for mushrooms soars, competition and cash is flowing in - and violence is rising.
"This is for people who missed the Gold Rush and would love to be commodities traders on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade," said Matt Briggs, owner of Portland's Cascade Mushroom, a major buyer. "People pick all day and brag and drink all night. It's a wild scene."
While the mycologists thrive, national forests across the country are cutting timber production by about half in a bid to protect threatened wildlife, salmon and watersheds. That means less timber revenue for the government.
Unlike trees, which take centuries to mature, mushrooms and other forest species can be harvested annually or every few years.
Unemployed loggers and immigrants from Cambodia and Laos are among those following the wild mushroom trail, said Bruce Casey, a Forest Service officer working to standardize management of special forest products.
Larson estimates there are 2,000 full-time and 1,600 weekend pickers in Oregon.
Mushrooms offer big profits. But prices fluctuate wildly on world markets - the fungi grow everywhere from Iraq to South America - and the wide-open nature of mushroom picking makes the industry difficult to regulate.
The Pacific Northwest is home to four commercially valuable mushroom varieties, including the matsutake, or pine mushroom, a big seller in Japan. The morel, chanterelle and boletus edulis are in demand in Europe, where the crop has been hurt by acid rain and fallout from the Chernobyl disaster.
The Forest Service historically has required commercial pickers to buy permits that allow unlimited picking. Fees run around $5 a day and $100 a season.
The agency is experimenting with selling mushroom rights the way it sells timber, to the highest bidder. It is studying mushroom supply and how to protect the fungi from obliteration.
In south-central Oregon's Fremont National Forest, commercial picking rights for one plot were auctioned to Matsumora Enterprises Inc. of Vancouver, B.C., for $5,555.
"We had never had any commercial permits," said Nancy Rose, a district ranger in Fremont. "But because we knew that the business had grown substantially in the last four to five years, and that when other forests had fires they tended to have an influx of people wanting to pick mushrooms, we decided we should treat the mushroom just as any other forest resource."
Briggs said all the attention is coming about five years too late.
"My view is it has peaked," he lamented. "The big problem is the success of Third World communist countries going capitalist. They're selling the same stuff for nothing.
"It's just like every other business. People are going where the cheap labor is."
by CNB