Farmers in New Zealand Optimistic Ahead of Harvest

Olive grow­ers in New Zealand expect good results from the com­ing har­vest sea­son.

Local farm­ers con­firmed that fruits are already dot­ting the trees in most groves, and this year’s har­vest appears to be larger than the pre­vi­ous two.

It would be the third year in a row pro­duc­tion has increased. About 200,000 liters were pro­duced in the 2019/20 crop year, with 270,000 liters pro­duced in 2020/21.

However, the expected growth does not sur­prise local experts since the weather has been favor­able in recent months.

Small local grow­ers also con­tinue to learn more about pre­vent­ing dis­ease and over­com­ing chal­lenges, result­ing in grow­ing yields.

“The man­ag­ing of most olive groves is improv­ing year over year,” Gayle Sheridan, Olives New Zealand​’s exec­u­tive offi­cer, told Olive Oil Times. ​“We just had a field day with grow­ers and wit­nessed the efforts that many have put into main­tain­ing their groves, opti­mal prun­ing and car­ing for the health of their trees.”

During the bian­nual field days, the asso­ci­a­tion vis­its olive groves in all the major grow­ing areas of the coun­try.

Some grow­ers in New Zealand are focus­ing on adopt­ing a har­vest sched­ule that might enhance the polyphe­nol and antiox­i­dant con­tent of their extra vir­gin olive oils.

“It is an inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non; analy­ses show how those con­tents are more present in local extra vir­gin olive oil as the con­sumers have also started to under­stand how ben­e­fi­cial they can be for their health,” Sheridan said.

To enhance the health pro­file of their oils, some grow­ers are actively study­ing farm­ing tech­niques that might improve the quan­ti­ties of the healthy con­tents.

“They do not want to limit their activ­ity to an early har­vest, which usu­ally ensures a good quan­tity of polyphe­nols; they are also inves­ti­gat­ing what other mea­sures can be adopted,” Sheridan said. ​“It is an area for us that is quite new.”

The types of olive trees planted in New Zealand, most of which come from Greece, Italy, Japan and Spain, can also help farm­ers increase the num­ber of healthy com­pounds in their oils.

“Frantoio is the most planted vari­ety in the coun­try,” Sheridan said, but Picual, Picholine, Pendolino, Kalamata and Koreneiki trees are also com­mon.

“We do have a New Zealand vari­ety known as J5, but we think it might have been derived from Frantoio as it looks like Frantoio,” Sheridan said.

Identifying the olive vari­eties that could bet­ter adapt to New Zealand’s spe­cific cli­mate has required time and effort for local grow­ers.

Stuart Tustin, a tree fruit phys­i­ol­o­gist and plant and food researcher, told Olive Oil Times that ​“in the 70s and the 80s, many [farm­ers] planted vari­eties com­ing from Middle Eastern coun­tries such as Israel.”

“But those trees did not adapt well to these lat­i­tudes,” he added. ​“Now, with most European cul­ti­vars, grow­ers are see­ing way more inter­est­ing yields.”

For its 300 olive farms grow­ing 350,000 trees over 2,130 hectares, the New Zealand har­vest sea­son starts in April in the north and pro­gres­sively moves south, where it should end by early August.

“Growers now know that they have to har­vest at the right time and that the full crop has to be har­vested not to have con­se­quences on the fol­low­ing sea­son,” Sheridan said.

She added that olive grow­ers in the coun­try pro­duce exclu­sively extra vir­gin olive oil.

“Last year, we got 98 per­cent extra vir­gin olive oil,” Sheridan said.

Local extra vir­gin olive oil qual­ity gets tested by spe­cial­ized labs in Australia fol­low­ing International Olive Council’s pro­to­cols and stan­dards for extra vir­gin olive oil.

The Olives New Zealand Association also releases the OliveMark trade­mark, which pro­duc­ers can adopt and show on their cer­ti­fied extra vir­gin olive oil con­tain­ers. The goal of the trade­mark is to instill a sense of trust between the cus­tomers and pro­duc­ers.

Experts cite the con­se­quences of a cli­mate that brings sig­nif­i­cant rain­fall in many areas as one of the main chal­lenges for local olive farm­ers. When there are high humid­ity lev­els, sev­eral pathogens can take advan­tage of the cli­mate and dam­age the olive trees.

The asso­ci­a­tion sug­gests that grow­ers actively com­bat the pathogens and spray their trees every 20 days.

“That is needed to keep on top of the dis­eases; oth­er­wise, once you see them, it is too late,” Sheridan said. ​“Many pro­ceed with rel­e­vant prun­ing oper­a­tions, not just once a year as might hap­pen else­where.”

“For instance, in these weeks, with the crop loads very vis­i­ble, we sug­gest that many farm­ers prune the branches that do not have fruits, remove them and encour­age new ones to grow,” she added.

According to Tustin, the parts of New Zealand that receive the low­est lev­els of rain­fall are where olive grow­ing is done most suc­cess­fully.

“Those areas cor­re­spond to regions where other indus­tries such as our wine indus­try are located,” he said.

Tustin empha­sized how due to the mar­itime cli­mate of the coun­try, even the areas with less rain­fall still report between 500 and 700 mil­lime­ters of rain each year.

While many farm­ers in the Mediterranean basin would be envi­ous of the rain in New Zealand, the pre­cip­i­ta­tion cre­ates con­di­tions for sev­eral dis­eases, includ­ing Spilocaea oleaginea
(pea­cock spot) or Cercospora.

“Those are heav­ily chal­leng­ing pathogens because so many of our grow­ers are small enter­prises planted by peo­ple that did not antic­i­pate that they would have to become… hor­ti­cul­tur­ists,” Tustin said.

He added how many grow­ers in the past did not prac­tice dis­ease con­trol, exper­i­ment­ing with con­se­quences such as leaf loss and reduced pro­duc­tiv­ity. Not all of them pruned the trees cor­rectly or at all.

“In such cases, we would find groves with trees out of con­trol, com­pli­cated by a high dis­ease pres­sure,” Tustin said.

That is why Olives New Zealand, Tustin and other local experts recently started a series of projects to restore sev­eral unhealthy olive groves, pro­gres­sively remov­ing excess branches. This allowed the light to come back on the trees while pro­gres­sively reduc­ing pests and pathogens thanks to cor­rect prun­ing.

Tustin said that many grow­ers have under­stood why the lack of prun­ing is a prob­lem.

“In the last year, as some of those groves were full with their beau­ti­ful canopy on top, they have seen how trees that once pro­duced between 10 to 15 kilo­grams of olives are now closer to 20 to 25 kilo­grams,” he added.

One of the most inter­est­ing research areas for Tustin and local experts is the need for some olive grow­ers to find organic alter­na­tives to spray­ing their trees with pes­ti­cides.

“Initially, they did not have sprays they could use, so we worked on devel­op­ing organic-com­pat­i­ble spray pro­grams,” he said. ​“To that end, I also con­tacted researchers from the University of Bari in Italy. We devel­oped a spray pro­gram com­pat­i­ble with organic olive farm­ing sim­i­lar to what we use for organic apple dis­ease con­trol.”

“It is still too early to say how suc­cess­ful it is,” Tustin added. ​“At the moment, though, we see that its early results resem­ble those of the con­ven­tional spray pro­gram, which is quite encour­ag­ing.”

For local olive oil pro­duc­ers, sea­sonal mar­kets are the best way to reach the con­sumers, Sheridan said.

“Those con­sumers want to know more about the prod­uct, how it is grown and if sprays are being used,” she added. ​“They ask ques­tions and are very dis­cern­ing about the olive oil they buy.”

Like other pro­duc­ing coun­tries, local con­sumers might notice price dif­fer­ences between the extra vir­gin olive oils sold by the local grow­ers and the imported brands found on super­mar­ket shelves.

“Yes, we have imports from dif­fer­ent coun­tries, such as Spain or Italy, and the price dif­fer­ence is a bit of a chal­lenge for us in mak­ing the con­sumers under­stand more about our extra vir­gin olive oils, the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and the qual­ity,” Sheridan said.

There are no high-den­sity or super-high-den­sity olive groves active in the coun­try, while irri­ga­tion is present in about one-quar­ter of the total groves.

The largest three grow­ers boast 40,000 trees, 27,000 and 7,000, respec­tively, while 70 per­cent of olive groves con­tain less than 1,000 trees.

Commercial groves, which can part­ner with super­mar­kets, rep­re­sent 13 per­cent of the total in New Zealand. However, Olives New Zealand expects this fig­ure to rise as more small grow­ers part­ner with larger ones.

Those mar­ket dynam­ics paired with the enhanced pro­duc­tiv­ity of the groves could also help the coun­try improve the per­cent­age of local extra vir­gin olive oils con­sumed in the coun­try.

New Zealanders con­sume approx­i­mately 4.5 mil­lion liters a year, 10 to 15 per­cent of which is locally pro­duced.