Registered buyers in Poland took in 2,601 tonnes of forest mushrooms in 2025

One row, two numbers

Table 4 of Poland’s annual forestry release sets a row headed “Grzyby leśne”, forest mushrooms, against two years. For 2024 it reads 4,001 tonnes; for 2025, 2,601. The release, Leśnictwo w 2025 r., was issued by Statistics Poland on 30 June 2026 and compiled by the Statistical Office in Białystok. Its narrative rounds the newer figure to 2.6 thousand tonnes and puts the change at 35.0% below the year before.

The verb matters more than the number. Polish statistics call this skup, procurement, and it counts mushrooms that were bought, not mushrooms that were found. The reporting obligation, set out in the methodological notes of the Statistical Yearbook of Forestry, falls on legal persons and organisational units with no legal entity that carry out the procurement of forest products as part of their economic activity, and, in the office’s own English wording, “this obligation does not refer to natural persons”. A basket carried home is bought by nobody, and so it cannot enter the table at all. Statistics Poland publishes no estimate of how much that amounts to, and this entry will not invent one.

The year it is measured against

A 35.0% drop reads like a failed season until the rest of the run is laid beside it. Successive releases give the same row as 2,749 tonnes in 2020, 2,337 in 2021, 3,503 in 2022, 2,831 in 2023 and 4,001 in 2024. The last of those is the highest figure in the series, and the office’s own English edition for 2024 recorded it as a rise of 41.3% on the year. Against that background, the 2,601 tonnes of 2025 sit above 2021, roughly 8% under 2023 and about 13% under the 2020–2025 mean of some 3,004 tonnes. The yearbook reaches further back still and gives 2,599 tonnes for 2015, two tonnes below the 2025 total.

Why procurement fell, the release does not say, and nor will this article. The quantity bought answers to prices, to demand, to export orders and to how many buying points chose to open, not only to how much fruited in the woods. “A third fewer mushrooms grew in 2025” is not a sentence that Table 4 can support.

The same table helps with proportion in another way. Forest fruit came in at 914 tonnes against 1,751 a year earlier, down 47.8%, while game animals moved in the opposite direction: 10,772 tonnes against 9,288, up 16.0%. Whatever happened in 2025, it was not a collapse of the survey itself.

What the definition quietly contains

Footnote a beneath the table states that the data concern fresh forest fruit and mushrooms. That describes the unit, not the scope. Dried purchases are counted: the yearbook records that product “bought in the procurement as the dry mass” is “converted into the fresh mass by applying conventional calculation indicators for individual species”. Part of the 2,601 tonnes is therefore a coefficient rather than a weighing, and nothing in the four-page release says so, because its methodology lives in a separate volume.

The species are named as well, in an official translation worth reading twice: “the Chanterelle, the Xerocomus, the Bolete, the Suillus and other forest mushrooms” — chanterelles, bay boletes, ceps and slippery jacks. A breakdown by species does exist, and it runs exactly a year behind. The most recent one covers 2024, where chanterelles accounted for 1,503 of the 4,001 tonnes, bay boletes for 1,289 and ceps for 1,136. Those three are the only columns the table itemises, so 73 tonnes are left over for slippery jacks and everything else, divided in a way nobody has published. No breakdown for 2025 exists yet, and none should be improvised. One further trap waits in the regional columns, whose footnote reads “Aggregation according to the supplier residence” — a voivodship figure records where the supplier is registered, not where the mushrooms grew.

What the figure is good for

This is not a measurement of Polish mushroom picking, and it is not a measurement of Polish mushroom production either. The 308.3 thousand tonnes of cultivated mushrooms grown in the same country in the same year come from indoor farms, a separate reporting system and a different definition; setting the two beside each other as “small” and “large” compares two unrelated questions.

What is left is a figure with an unusually clear edge, and edges can be checked. The release takes a minute to read, and its predecessors sit in the same archive if you would rather have the series than the headline. Late in 2026 the yearbook should add the species split for 2025, which will show whether the fall spread evenly or landed mainly on chanterelles, the heaviest component of the 2024 take. Until then the honest reading is a narrow one, and worth having precisely for that: registered buyers in Poland took in 2,601 tonnes of forest mushrooms, in an ordinary year measured from an exceptional one.