VISUALIZED: Czechia's real 'free' harvest just got a price tag—and it's massive

Every autumn, hundreds of thousands of Czechs disappear into the forest with a wicker basket and come back with dinner. It looks like a hobby. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, it's closer to an industry.

In 2025, Czechs foraged an estimated CZK 7.25 billion worth of wild mushrooms and forest fruit – over 20,000 tons of mushrooms alone, plus 5,800 tons of blueberries, 2,200 tons of raspberries, and 1,900 tons of blackberries. That's actually a below-average year: foragers have collected roughly 38,000 tons annually on average since the Ministry started tracking this in 1994.

This isn't a fringe activity, either. Nearly one in three Czechs goes foraging regularly, and only 17% say they never do it at all. There's a whole unspoken ritual to it – most head out before 9 a.m., return to the same patch of forest they've foraged for years, and pass down the best spots (and the best-kept secrets) between generations.

What might surprise expats most, though, is that all of this is completely legal – and largely unlimited. Under Czech law, anyone can enter almost any forest, public or private, and forage for personal use free of charge, with no kilogram cap.

Compare that to Austria and Slovenia (2 kg/person/day), Croatia (3 kg/person/day), Germany (0.5–2 kg depending on the state), or the Netherlands, where unauthorized foraging is treated like poaching. The only catch: picking to resell commercially requires the landowner's permission.

And some of what's out there is genuinely valuable – fresh porcini (hřib smrkový) sell for 200–600 CZK/kg, while dried morels (smrž obecný) can fetch up to 3,000 CZK/kg.

Foraging activity isn't evenly spread across the country, either: the Liberecký, Jihočeský, and Plzeňský regions see the most active forest visits, while the Středočeský region racks up the highest total volume overall – largely thanks to Prague residents making day trips out of the city.

So next time you see someone in rubber boots disappearing into a forest outside Prague, know this: they might be sitting on real money.