Dry Summer Leaves Italy's Piedmont Truffle Hunters Short of Harvest

In the misty hills of Piedmont, in northern Italy, the truffle season has begun badly. According to AFP reporting published by The Local Italy on 4 November 2026, an excessively dry summer has left black truffles few and far between, and the people who spend their nights searching for them with trained dogs are coming home with little.

Giuseppe Esposito, a 69-year-old truffle hunter who works near Pietra Marazzi with his dog Attila, told AFP that conditions looked right on the surface, with a good moon, yet he found only two small truffles in a night. He said the spots where he usually hunts needed rain in July or August, and did not get it. Like most hunters, known locally as trifulai, he keeps his locations secret, even from his own family.

Marco Boido, a 49-year-old truffle dealer and restaurateur in Alessandria who also owns woods in Pietra Marazzi, put numbers on the problem. A month into the season, he said, production was down 50 percent in his area, and the truffles that did appear were much smaller, though more fragrant. If the drought continues, he warned, there will be fewer and fewer of them. It is worth noting that this is one dealer's estimate for his own area, and the article gives no national or regional harvest totals.

A hunter working for Boido said white truffle production was also off kilter this year, because unseasonal heat had dried out stream banks and the dampest valleys where truffles tend to grow. In Umbria, in central Italy, another hunter reported that the better areas this year were the more enclosed, cooler mountain valleys, where moisture held through the summer. He added that the aroma was exceptional and the texture very firm, which is keeping market prices high. White truffles are worth several thousand euros per kilogram, and premium black truffles typically sell for hundreds of euros per kilogram, so a smaller harvest matters to the people whose income depends on it.

The article also places the shortage in a wider market. Most black truffles now come from plantations, and Spain's industry is growing strongly, with farmers planting large orchards and cutting costs. In 2025 the Italian government tried to reform the sector by encouraging more plantation production, but the bill faced strong opposition from traditional trifulai and remains stuck in the Senate.

Fabio Cerretano, president of the Italian federation of truffle gatherers' associations, argued that the answer lies in policy. He called for measures to shift the calendars and to manage the land, so as not to block the water that runs down with the plants. That points to a practical, local response: how woods, streams and seasonal rules are managed can decide whether a wild, fragile product survives a run of dry years.

The story is small in scale but familiar in shape. A tradition tied to damp woodland and a narrow seasonal window is exposed when summers turn dry, and the hunters, dealers and restaurants that depend on it have little room to adapt on their own. It also shows how climate stress reaches food culture and rural livelihoods well before it shows up in national statistics.

Why it matters

A wild truffle needs damp woodland and a narrow seasonal window, which makes it an early indicator of how dry summers reach food, income and tradition. When a dealer reports output down by half in his own area, the signal is local but the exposure is wide: rural livelihoods built on fragile ecosystems have little buffer against drought.