When police canine handlers Dean Poletta and Warren Rogers decided to set up a truffle dog detection agency as a side hustle, the industry was little more than a hobby in South Australia.
Six years on they are in high demand with 24 farms or truffieres across the state.
Farmers hire dogs including Mr Rogers’s koolie, Ruby, and Mr Poletta’s labrador, Gus, to sniff out truffles on their properties.
“It’s growing exponentially and we are struggling to keep up at the moment,” Mr Poletta says.
They are bringing on new staff and training up extra dogs.
A range of dog breeds are used to find the truffles. (Landline: Kerry Staight)
It takes all sorts
While the Lagotto Romagnolo breed is often referred to as the truffle dog in Italy, there are lots of breeds that can get the job done.
“We always say that any dog can be a detection dog, it’s the want,” Mr Rogers says.
“You can have the best dog in the world, if it doesn’t want to do it and wants to sit on the couch all day it’s not going to be working in the middle of winter.”
His regular offsider is a six-year-old koolie called Ruby.
“Being a working dog, we didn’t know whether we could actually use her for detection, but she’s taken to it like a duck to water,” he says.
“If we are working close to sheep and cattle, she can get a little bit distracted, but with some timely Schmackos, she’s back on track.”
Dean Poletta says finding what motivates a dog is the key to training them.
“Gus is my big blonde excavator,” he says.
“He is a six-year-old labrador, highly driven by food, so pretty easy to keep on task.
“And once you pair the reward or the motivator with the odour, that’s where you kind of start.”
Dean Poletta and Gus. (ABC News: Kerry Staight)
How are truffles found?
For the dog handlers, it’s a very different working environment from their main job with the police service where they are often indoors looking for things like drugs and explosives.
“The conditions [on farms] are definitely harder because we have no control over them,” Mr Poletta says.
White and black truffles from the Kelleys’ farm. (ABC News: Kerry Staight)
“But it’s [truffle’s] a big odour, which is probably a little bit easier.”
A truffle is a sought-after edible fungus that’s related to mushrooms but grows underground, living off certain types of trees in a symbiotic relationship.
“The dogs are finding these things that can be up to an inch or six inches [2.5 centimetres to 16cm] under the ground,” Warren Rogers says.
“I still get a buzz out of it to see how incredible they are.”
The tricky part is stopping the dogs from damaging the sought-after fungi, which sells for up to $2.50 a gram.
“We want the dog to to dig to an extent or to mark the ground where we have to dig to find the truffle,” Mr Poletta says.
“But we want them to stop when they’re close to the truffle.”
Pivoting to truffles
Among the growers relying on the detection team are Sabina and Ben Kelley, who took up truffle farming in the Barossa Valley five years ago.
It is a big tree change for the couple who used to own award-winning fish and chip shops on the New South Wales central coast.
Sabina and Ben Kelley pivoted from fish and chips to truffles. (ABC News: Carl Saville)
“We were working 85 hours a week and it was just too much,” Mrs Kelley says.
“We watched a show [where] they had a truffiere and they had a pig and dogs and I was like that’s it, that’s what I want to do.”
Pigs vs dogs
Peggy the failed truffle pig. (ABC News: Kerry Staight)
Female pigs have traditionally been used to hunt truffles because of their sense of smell and because truffles contain a pheromone, which is found in the saliva of male pigs.
But Mrs Kelley’s idea of using her pig Peggy in the truffiere hasn’t gone to plan.
“It hasn’t worked out at all,” she says.
“She grew and grew and grew some more, so trying to get a truffle out of her mouth wouldn’t be fun.”
Mr Rogers says dogs are easier to train and “much easier to handle”.
“Pigs are natural foragers so will eat truffles unless they’re trained to eat something else as a reward,” he says.
As for the growers’ dogs, one of whom is appropriately named Truffles, they’re handy if not as thorough as Ruby and Gus.
“They’ll find truffles that we just can’t find with our dogs,” Ben Kelley says.
“They’re obviously doing it weekly and our dogs are still couch potatoes.”
The Kelleys’ dogs are handy but not quite as experienced as Gus and Ruby. (ABC News: Carl Saville)
Early crop
Mr Poletta says the couple has a knack for growing truffles, producing their first crop after just three years.
“Ben asked us to come out and I tried to encourage him not to use us yet because it was too early but he insisted,” Mr Poletta says.
“So we came out and we found a couple of kilos I think in that first hunt on three-year-old trees, which was the earliest we’d ever found truffles at that point in South Australia.”
Mr and Mrs Kelley digging up truffles. (ABC News: Kerry Staight)
While turning truffles into a profitable business is still a work in progress, Mr Kelley is pretty chuffed at what’s now coming out of the ground.
“It’s really cool that we did something that some people said, ‘You’re mad doing’ and we did it and it works,” he says.
