Heavy fine from German customs Collectors want to smuggle kilos of mushrooms into Switzerland

Expensive fun for four mushroom pickers: they were caught with 70 kilograms of mushrooms at the Swiss border by customs in Germany and now have to pay a heavy fine.

The mushroom season is open and people with baskets and bags can be seen picking mushrooms everywhere in the forests. There are also plenty of mushrooms in the Black Forest near the border, as the main customs office in Singen discovered.

Two Swiss, one Italian and one Austrian citizen, aged between 48 and 73, had attempted to bring between ten and 29 kilograms of mushrooms, such as the specially protected porcini mushroom, across the border into Switzerland.

Only one kilogram of mushrooms per person

A bit much, because the quantity for personal consumption is rather limited, as Sonja Müller, press spokeswoman for the Singen customs office, clarifies. "In order to protect nature, the Federal Nature Conservation Act only allows a small amount of mushrooms to be collected for personal use," says Müller. "In recent years, the guideline has been one kilogram of fresh mushrooms per person per day. This quantity limit applies to every mushroom picker, including people who live in Germany."

The industrious mushroom pickers are probably aware of this now, as they have to pay a hefty fine of 6600 francs in total. Even worse: it was not possible to use the seized mushrooms in any meaningful way, so they were destroyed.

As Ralf Göhring from the district forestry office in Waldshut explained to the German broadcaster "Südwestrundfunk", it is often mushroom pickers from Switzerland who ignore the maximum limits. However, the increased controls at the border have now increased the risk of being caught.