(upbeat acoustic music) - Hi, my name is Brian Wilson.

This is my dog, Beth.

We're going out training on the morel mushrooms.

So this spring, she will be a morel master.

Huh?

Mushrooms, go find 'em.

(upbeat acoustic music) (dog sniffing) (upbeat acoustic music continues) Well my backstory is, I was a boat captain on the Illinois River.

I pushed barges up and down the river for 17 years and I decided to give all that up for the dogs.

And to be honest, it's the best decision I've ever made.

(upbeat music) (dogs barking) So what it was like switching from the river to the dogs, really it was a big change, 'cause the river was very demanding, a lot of hours.

And this is too, but it's different.

It's on my time, it's what I want to do.

Owning my own business has always been my dream.

So it's been great.

Once I got into dog training, I found out how much I loved it.

Anything with the nose of a dog is where my passion is.

Then I went to a school in Missouri and from there my knowledge with dogs and dog training really excelled.

So when we moved in here in 2016, this was an old barn.

It needed a lot of work and we decided to put that work in.

We gave it a facelift.

And from there, we have grown.

Where we're sitting right now is our newest addition.

We plan on continuing to grow and eventually putting up a whole new facility.

Right now, we can house up to 50 dogs for boarding.

That's including daycare, boarding, and training dogs.

How I got into morels is I've always been passionate about the dog's noses.

The fact that they can smell 10,000 times better than us.

Just knowing that and thinking what all they can smell, and it's always intrigued me, and I've always hunted morels my whole life, and no one else is doing it.

And I'm like, "Why?

This don't make any sense."

So I started using my dogs to find morels and here we are.

All right, what we have over here is we have the morels that we use in the training.

These are the fake morels, they're made out of resin.

We use these and then we take a dried morel.

So actually, I have some here.

We take a dried morel like that and we soak it in water.

And once it's soaked, I just rub it over the top of these, what I call buttering them up, and it gives the scent of the morel and it looks like a morel.

So now we have basically a morel that we can go hide in the woods for training purposes.

(engine rumbling) (upbeat acoustic music) (dog sniffing) (upbeat acoustic music continues) Yes!

Go get it!

Once you learn how to communicate with them, they understand what you're saying and it goes really well.

I think where people really mess up is they expect the dog to be good, when they're not doing a good job training the dog.

So this is the box that we use for the training.

We have a tin in there that we just put a morel inside for the scent and I put it in that box and the dog sticks his head in, he gets paid.

The reason the morels are so treasured around here is because of the taste.

They are like gold.

Morels are very, very valuable.

Actually, when we was in Kentucky, they was selling for $100 a pound, but I understand why, they're delicious.

We definitely had our fair share.

(dog sniffing) For me, taking dogs to the woods to hunt more morels is one of the most exciting things you can do in the spring.

I love to watch dogs work.

So for me it adds fun to it.

Watching a dog's nose work, watching them be running through the timber and hit that scent, go to that morel, and just stop and spin and run to it, that's what it's all about.

What we offer for the morels right now is we offer an online course that we sell and then I offer a board and train type program, so your dog comes here and stays for two months and we train it to find morels and then send it home.

(upbeat acoustic music) (dog sniffing) We take our dogs mainly on state ground and the reason that is, is because state ground is open to the public, anybody can go there and usually it's been picked over.

There's always people that get out there before you.

And we just prove that our morel dogs are worth it by taking 'em to that property and finding morels behind other people.

(upbeat acoustic music) Our hopes for the future of Wilson's Dog Training is to build a 100 dog kennel, that'd be able to house 100 dogs.

When I first started and I said I was gonna do 50 dogs, a lot of people thought I was crazy because we're so rural.

But we are now doing 50 dogs a day through the busy season and I feel we can do 100 dogs.

(dogs barking) (upbeat acoustic music) I think getting dogs out and just out in the world is a huge thing for dogs.

And then when people can come back to me and tell me that they use my system to train, that really gets me excited.

I like hearing that.

Good girl.

(dogs barking)