His customers are from all over, but mainly Minnesota, South Dakota and Montana, and some local restaurants also buy them. One day he gathered 80 pounds of morels near the Pactola Reservoir in the Black Hills. Merxbauer said 2018 was one of his biggest hauls. With the significant flooding in Nebraska, though, he suspects it may be a tough season there. He has about 150 pounds of orders to fill this year, and he’ll travel to the Black Hills in South Dakota, and perhaps Nebraska, to gather his crop. At first, when he moved to Parkston from Fergus Falls, Minn., the morels he found were shared with family and friends.

He started taking the hobby a little more serious about five years ago. It’s hard for Merxbauer to estimate hours and miles traveled each year hunting mushrooms. If it’s too wet, they get soggy and water-logged, so the season is pretty short.” “Once they start coming up, you’ve got about two, maybe three weeks,” Merxbauer said. April and May is the ripe time of year for Midwestern states as morels need the ground temperature to be about 52 to 53 degrees to grow. According to websites that track morel locations and where they’re growing, some of the first mushrooms of the year were spotted in January in southern California. Merxbauer said ticks, mosquitoes and difficulty finding morels are what scare most people from getting into the hobby.ĭue to the warmer temperatures, the southern United States see significantly more morels, and the people who hunt them. It’s a special breed of people who hunt morels. Jeremy Merxbauer, of Parkston, S.D., shows off some freshly picked morel mushrooms in a spot in northern Hutchinson County in May 2019. But morels bring in a nice string of revenue as well, selling for $30 to $45 per pound, with the fluctuation based on the time of the order. Merxbauer’s main occupation is running J & T’s Garage in Parkston.

And it’s even harder to find people on this side of the state who dedicate the hours, like Merxbauer does, to hunting them. In eastern South Dakota, it’s not easy to find morels - those wild, edible mushrooms that grow in the spring. “It’s a lot of work, and that’s probably the biggest reason it’s so hard to find anybody who will give you any information about any places.” “It’s just going out and searching and searching and searching,” he said before picking 10 morels on some Hutchinson County public land. On a recent May afternoon in Hutchinson County, Jeremy Merxbauer - dressed in all camo - was the guide and expert on one of his favorite spring activities: morel mushroom hunting. Weave through the cedar trees and tip-toe along the water’s edge at the river bottom. After parking along a gravel road, go through the barbed-wire fence and head down into a ravine.

Morel mushroom hunting s dakota