Italian Farmers Take Stock of Current Harvest, Look Ahead to Challenges

Most of cen­tral and north­ern Italy increased olive oil pro­duc­tion in the 2022/23 crop year, while the south expe­ri­enced a drop.

Puglia, Sicilia and Calabria, which usu­ally con­tribute a sig­nif­i­cant share of the national out­put, suf­fered from an ​‘off-year’ in the olive trees’ nat­ural alter­nate bear­ing cycle and a series of weather-related issues.

Since the first phe­no­log­i­cal phases, olive groves across the coun­try have been affected by a lack of rain. Some areas were also hit by late frosts, which hin­dered flow­er­ing and fruit set­ting and led to sev­eral cases of fruit drop, accord­ing to the Institute of Services for the Agricultural and Food Market (Ismea). Then, the pro­longed drought and very high tem­per­a­tures hin­dered veg­e­ta­tive devel­op­ment.

As the olive trees’ veg­e­ta­tive restart approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Italian pro­duc­ers are tak­ing stock of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion and look­ing at the chal­lenges ahead.

“Last sum­mer will be remem­bered as one of the hottest,” Tuscan pro­ducer Matteo Frescobaldi told Olive Oil Times.

“We had many days full of sun­shine, and our plants partly ben­e­fited from this con­di­tion, which led to an excel­lent fruit set­ting in early June,” he added. ​“However, the scarcity of pre­cip­i­ta­tion that lasted through July gave rise to seri­ous con­cern.”

According to LaMMA (the Environmental Monitoring and Modeling Laboratory for Sustainable Development), a coop­er­a­tive effort between Tuscany and the Italian National Research Council, five heat waves were recorded in Florence dur­ing the sum­mer of 2022, the longest of which lasted for 15 days, from July 14 to 28.

On June 27, the syn­op­tic weather sta­tion of Florence Peretola, located in the north of the city, recorded a tem­per­a­ture of 41 °C, the high­est value ever recorded by the sta­tion in June.

Furthermore, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said the sum­mer of 2022 was the hottest on record in Europe. However, it was Italy’s sec­ond hottest after the sum­mer of 2003.

“The last olive oil crop year was com­plex, and nev­er­the­less, over the past years, we have become aware that chal­leng­ing har­vests are no longer the excep­tion but the rule,” said Angelo Bo, an agron­o­mist.

“In Tuscany, until mid-August, heat and drought made us fear the worst for the health of the plants and fruits, but even­tu­ally, thanks to the rain that fell in the sec­ond half of the month, the trees man­aged to recover and reach what we might define as an opti­mal devel­op­ment,” he added.

According to LaMMA, sum­mer pre­cip­i­ta­tion in Tuscany was only slightly below aver­age (with a rain deficit of 19 per­cent). Still, it rained very lit­tle in June and July, which recorded a deficit of 75 and 60 per­cent, respec­tively. Instead, the rain was con­cen­trated in August, which recorded val­ues well above aver­age (80 per­cent).

“The rains that arrived in late August were a real god­send,” Frescobaldi said. ​“They allowed the plants to rehy­drate in the cru­cial early phase of the oil accu­mu­la­tion process in the fruits.”

Then, the tem­per­a­tures started to drop in the Florentine hills between September and October, result­ing in a sub­stan­tial tem­per­a­ture dif­fer­ence between day and night.

“This fac­tor has favored a good devel­op­ment of the organolep­tic prop­er­ties that char­ac­ter­ize the great oils of cen­tral Tuscany,” said Frescobaldi, who started the har­vest smoothly in early October as usual.

However, this was not so for many grow­ers in the south, who had to plan to stave off the adverse impact of a warm, humid cli­mate.

Nevertheless, accord­ing to Ismea, many pro­duc­ers man­aged to obtain extra vir­gin olive oil with a higher level of qual­ity than it would be under nor­mal con­di­tions despite these set­backs.

“After a pro­longed drought, within three weeks, a hot and humid cli­mate was favored by light and steady rains,” said Donato Conserva, the Apulian pro­ducer behind Mimì.

“This cre­ated the ideal envi­ron­ment for the olive fruit fly,” she added. ​“A mas­sive attack of this dipteran threat­ened the results obtained with irri­ga­tion. Despite hav­ing to dis­card about 30 per­cent of fruits, we were still able to obtain a good pro­duc­tion.”

The qual­ity has remained very high also due to some of the mea­sures Conserva took, includ­ing her deci­sion to hire more work­ers.

“We have recruited dou­ble the num­ber of work­ers, which has allowed us to speed up the oper­a­tions and pick healthy fruits in time,” Conserva said.

The ongo­ing weather issues have sig­nif­i­cantly impacted how olive grow­ers and millers work through­out the har­vest.

Careful advanced plan­ning for har­vest­ing and milling oper­a­tions has become nec­es­sary to meet the chal­lenges of olive farm­ing, avoid losses and keep qual­ity stan­dards high.

“In Puglia, there has been a drop in pro­duc­tion of at least 35 per­cent mainly due to a drought that we have not seen for 70 years,” the Apulian agron­o­mist Cosimo Damiano Guarini said. ​“We know the olive tree is a xero­phytic plant and there­fore needs lit­tle water, but water is required dur­ing cru­cial phases, such as flow­er­ing, fruit set­ting and oil accu­mu­la­tion, to obtain qual­ity.”

“The farm­ers who used an irri­ga­tion sys­tem were able to mit­i­gate the effects of the lack of rain and face the high pro­duc­tion costs,” he added. ​“However, those who do not use it or can­not afford the expense inevitably expe­ri­enced a pro­duc­tion decline.”

Damiano Guarini said another new chal­lenge to con­sider is the rapid ripen­ing of fruits trig­gered by the very high tem­per­a­tures in many areas as the har­vest approached. Indeed, anom­alies in the devel­op­ment of fruits were widely reported through­out the coun­try.

“In Tuscany, some farm­ers were alarmed by an unex­pected early ripen­ing and asked to open the mill facil­i­ties in advance,” Bo said. ​“However, the devel­op­ment of fruits was very uneven, espe­cially in the inte­rior of the region.”

“According to the vari­ety, the fruits showed a reg­u­lar ripen­ing in some areas, while in oth­ers, they were already ripe in mid-October and became over­ripe quickly,” he added. ​“In some other cases, early devel­op­ing vari­eties instead devel­oped the best of their aro­matic pro­files later, at the begin­ning of November.”

“For exam­ple, in January, I col­lected sev­eral green olives, then appar­ently unripe but with the pulp in an advanced state of ripeness,” Bo con­tin­ued. ​“This means that we can­not rely solely on the color to under­stand whether the olives are ready to be har­vested. And this fur­ther indi­cates the dif­fi­culty of inter­pret­ing the empir­i­cal val­ues avail­able to us.”

It has become clear that high-qual­ity olive oil pro­duc­ers and farm­ers must be proac­tive, accu­rately sched­ul­ing the work and mak­ing strate­gic deci­sions.

“The approach of qual­ity grow­ers now acknowl­edges that pro­duc­tion may be reduced in quan­tity but must main­tain high qual­ity lev­els,” Guarini said. ​“Not only must they cal­cu­late times and costs in advance, but they also have to take pro­duc­tion deci­sions in itinere.”

“For exam­ple, if they pro­duce blends, they can choose which vari­eties or what per­cent­age of a vari­ety to use in a prod­uct, opt­ing every year for vari­eties less affected by the increas­ingly fre­quent weather extremes,” he added.

In this sce­nario, ensur­ing qual­ity becomes chal­leng­ing, but the right approach can pro­vide great sat­is­fac­tion.

“Despite all these dif­fi­cul­ties, farm­ers who were able to ana­lyze the sit­u­a­tion and worked on pre­ven­tion have been repaid by the healthy olives, which deliv­ered excel­lent extra vir­gin olive oils, often char­ac­ter­ized by very pleas­ant and intense aro­mas,” Guarini said

“This is telling us that we should adapt our agro­nomic man­age­ment to the chal­lenges ahead by focus­ing on the phys­i­ol­ogy of the plant and its bal­ance,” he added. ​“We must act quickly and accu­rately to bet­ter cope with an ever-chang­ing sit­u­a­tion.”