Better Soil Management, Not Intensive Agriculture, Will Save Mediterranean Olive Groves

Andalusia, the most impor­tant olive-grow­ing area in the world, is fac­ing two failed har­vests in a row.

Record-break­ing high spring tem­per­a­tures in 2022 have been fol­lowed by unsea­son­able drought (and then extreme flood­ing) in 2023. Climate change has arrived, and the olive oil indus­try might be first in the fir­ing line. We could be fac­ing a period of volatil­ity, dis­rup­tion, and, at worst, eco­log­i­cal col­lapse.

All-time highs in global prices are the first impact of the cri­sis. Great news for farm­ers with yield. But bad for proces­sors, brands, and cus­tomers. High prices mean sub­sti­tu­tion with cheaper cook­ing oils and incen­tivize fraud by providers. And booms almost always lead to busts, which can wipe out invest­ments pred­i­cated on those higher prices. As they say in the energy sec­tor, ​“the cure for high prices is high prices.”

For brands and proces­sors, the obvi­ous response is to find new sup­ply and start plant­ing in other regions — the more effi­cient, the bet­ter. So, invest­ment in super-high-den­sity groves in Portugal seems to be accel­er­at­ing, and in Tunisia, the other great area of recent out­put growth, the government’s export pro­mo­tion strat­egy is also to push for ​“renewal” of cur­rent pro­duc­tion by super-high-den­sity cul­ti­va­tion.

But doing the same thing all over again might be a mis­take.

My com­pany, Amfora, sells extra vir­gin olive oil from regen­er­a­tive agri­cul­ture farm­ers. We’re strong believ­ers in the sci­ence and the ben­e­fits of soil regen­er­a­tion.

From this per­spec­tive, the cur­rent cri­sis in Andalusia is not a sur­prise. It is the long-fore­told result of bio­di­ver­sity col­lapse, soil degra­da­tion, bro­ken water cycles, and, in turn, the input-inten­sive tech­niques that super-high-den­sity olive farm­ing encour­ages.

Using this cri­sis to extend input-inten­sive prac­tices won’t help our indus­try adapt to cli­mate change but rather make it more vul­ner­a­ble. Ultimately, it will spread eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter to as yet unaf­fected regions.

How input-inten­sive groves dam­age ecosys­tems is easy to under­stand. Where cen­te­nary groves are ripped out to cre­ate high-den­sity rows, demand for nutri­ents increases beyond the capac­ity of unnur­tured soil to pro­vide and renew itself.

Artificial fer­til­izer meets that demand but, at the same time, dis­rupts micro­bial-fun­gal exchange net­works that we now under­stand sup­port soil life, reduc­ing nat­ural fer­til­ity fur­ther. To reduce com­pe­ti­tion for food and water, farm­ers apply her­bi­cide to kill weeds, cre­at­ing bare soil and denud­ing bio­di­ver­sity that sup­ports nat­ural preda­tors of pests such as the olive fly. Pesticide becomes nec­es­sary to main­tain qual­ity and yield. Fungicide, too, is needed to sup­port trees now more sus­cep­ti­ble to infec­tions, killing any ben­e­fi­cial fungi that remain.

So now much of Andalusian olive cul­ti­va­tion exists in a mono­cul­ture desert, main­tained only by chem­i­cal inputs — rocky dry ground, dirt, not soil, con­tain­ing lit­tle organic mat­ter and hold­ing very lit­tle water; the plant and soil evap­o­tran­spi­ra­tion that pre­vi­ously cre­ated rain has dis­ap­peared. Increased water demand can only come from local aquifers, which are no longer renewed. When rain does come, it stays on the sur­face and cre­ates flood­ing.

This is a self-rein­forc­ing cas­cade: a pos­i­tive feed­back loop that explains what we’re wit­ness­ing in 2023. Hydrologists call the end game ​“drought-fire-flood.” We can see this at work in California, another region where high-den­sity agro­forestry is the rule. While Andalusia has, at least so far, been spared the fire, flood and drought both appear new and per­sis­tent fea­tures.

So what now? How sure are we this is real? Do we need to write off bil­lions invested in inten­sive olive oil pro­duc­tion in Southern Spain? What can we do?

Firstly, it’s obvi­ous that no one knows. Two con­sec­u­tive failed har­vests might be a freak event. The 2024/25 har­vest might be huge, and prices may nor­mal­ize. New sources of sup­ply might come online, off­set­ting volatil­ity in Andalusian out­put.

But even if we can’t be sure struc­tural change is here, we can mea­sure its poten­tial impact. If it’s at least pos­si­ble that some­thing has bro­ken in Andalusia, respon­si­ble for almost 40 per­cent of global olive oil pro­duc­tion, it could be a national and indus­try-wide eco­log­i­cal, eco­nomic and social cat­a­stro­phe. A response is needed from gov­ern­ment and busi­ness.

Happily, it is too soon to write the region off. Olive trees aren’t meant to destroy ecosys­tems. They’re a regional key­stone species; they can hold the land together, draw­ing water from deep under­ground for use by other species, pro­vid­ing rich habi­tat and other envi­ron­men­tal ser­vices — not to men­tion deli­cious and healthy nutri­tion for human com­mu­ni­ties. They can do so again.

The solu­tions are not new or hard; we already know what to do. Spanish sci­en­tists, such as Millán Millán, direc­tor of the Center for Environmental Studies of the Mediterranean in Valencia, have been research­ing water cycles and how to fix them for decades.

We know plants help cre­ate their own rain. Re-veg­e­tat­ing wasted land and slow­ing runoff from water­sheds using cis­terns, trenches and swales are all solu­tions at a land­scape level. Creating bio­di­ver­sity refuges such as hedges and cor­ri­dors to bring back preda­tors can reduce the need for bio­cides.

As Dimitri Tsitos of the Arbo-Innova Project points out, plant­ing cover crops in high-den­sity groves can greatly con­tribute to adding fer­til­ity, reduc­ing ground tem­per­a­tures, and boost­ing soil water reten­tion. Arbo-Innova is inter­est­ing, a brand-new ini­tia­tive to help regen­er­ate high-den­sity groves in Iberia, sup­ported by lead­ing con­sul­tants such as Soil Capital Farming.

Landscape-level adap­ta­tions might reduce areas under cul­ti­va­tion and thus out­put per farm. But plot-level sav­ings in input costs can mean farms make more profit. Farmers could see increases in over­all yield as soils come back to life.

Mindset shifts are needed; plowed soil between trees was always the sign of a ​“tidy” grove. Instead, farm­ers should take pride in rich plant bio­mass and bio­di­ver­sity, know­ing root exu­date exchange is feed­ing their trees.

No-till cover is just a start; ani­mal inte­gra­tion, even syn­trop­ics, are pos­si­ble future inter­ven­tions. Better tast­ing and more nutri­tious oil could mean improved pric­ing and oppor­tu­ni­ties to reform the indus­try.

New mar­ket­ing mod­els, such as Amfora’s, can help, too; we cut out inter­me­di­aries, bring­ing regen­er­a­tive farm­ers a greater share of final pric­ing. Overall, we’ve just scratched the sur­face of the pro­duc­tiv­ity gains from the regen­er­a­tion rev­o­lu­tion.

Climate change is global, but the world is made up of land­scapes; there are sim­ple actions farm­ers can take to pro­tect and renew theirs. Collectively, we can head off dis­as­ter and even make things bet­ter and more resilient. Acknowledge the prob­lem and act.

Eurof Uppington is the CEO and founder of Amfora, a Swiss-based olive oil retailer focused on pro­mot­ing sus­tain­abil­ity.