Turkish Producers Set for Bumper Harvest

Olive oil pro­duc­ers in Turkey antic­i­pate a record-break­ing har­vest in the 2024/25 crop year.

According to the offi­cial har­vest esti­mate released by the Turkish National Olive and Olive Oil Council (UZZK), the season’s olive oil pro­duc­tion will exceed the 421,000 met­ric tons pro­duced in 2022/23.

“An olive oil har­vest of 475,000 tons is esti­mated,” UZZK pres­i­dent Mustafa Tan said. ​“This also sur­passes the record of 421,000 tons two years ago in 2022/23.”

“Our coun­try is mak­ing a great break­through in olive cul­ti­va­tion,” he added. ​“In 2022/23, it ranked sec­ond in the world after Spain. There was a drought in Spain in those years. Our coun­try was more for­tu­nate, but this year, our coun­try showed that it was not a coin­ci­dence. In this sense, we are very happy.”

Should the offi­cial pro­duc­tion esti­mate come to fruition, and with other sig­nif­i­cant Mediterranean pro­duc­ers such as Italy and Greece expect­ing low to mod­er­ate yields, Turkey is also likely to repo­si­tion itself as the sec­ond-largest olive oil pro­ducer in the world behind Spain.

However, despite the pre­dicted record crop, Tan noted that the pro­longed dry weather pre­vail­ing in the county has cast doubt on the Turkish olive oil sec­tor.

“While we should have been very happy this year, unfor­tu­nately, there is great pes­simism in the sec­tor because rain­fall has never been this late,” he said. ​“Every day [the pro­duc­ers] wait, they worry whether the olives will dis­ap­pear or go back.”

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) office in Turkey’s cap­i­tal, Ankara, con­firmed that the country’s olive oil pro­duc­ers are on track for a bumper yield, albeit mostly those with irri­gated olive groves.

“Production and export expec­ta­tions are quite high,” the office’s agri­cul­tur­ist spe­cial­ist, Kubilay Karabina, told Olive Oil Times. ​“However, due to the dry sum­mer months, it is said that small pro­duc­ers, espe­cially those who do not have irri­ga­tion facil­i­ties, will encounter a yield below expec­ta­tions.”

Karabina added that the prices of the season’s olive oils will be shaped mainly by fac­tors such as the qual­ity of the fresh oils and the pro­duc­tion costs in Turkey.

“Depending on the qual­ity, prices are expected to soften in dol­lar terms after har­vest,” he said. ​“However, high labor costs will pre­vent a down­ward shift in prices. As of now, no prob­lems that would neg­a­tively affect total qual­ity have been reported to us.”

Producers across Turkey are also antic­i­pat­ing a boun­ti­ful crop in the year ahead. However, some expect the national olive oil yield to be lower than the record har­vest esti­mate from UZZK.

“We expect a sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter olive oil har­vest this year com­pared to the pre­vi­ous sea­son,” said Can Candeger, a man­ager part­ner at Artem Oliva from Izmir, one of Turkey’s largest olive oil pro­duc­ers and exporters.

“While har­vest has started slowly in the south­east, the full har­vest will com­mence in early November,” he added. ​“Our ini­tial esti­mates sug­gest a poten­tial increase of around 40 per­cent in yield com­pared to last year, with an expected total of about 300,000 tons across Turkey.”

In the pre­vi­ous 2023/24 crop year, squeezed between the 2022/23 har­vest and the record-fore­casted 2024/25 har­vest, Turkey fol­lowed the trend of reduced yields across the Mediterranean basin with an over­all pro­duc­tion of about 200,000 tons.

Candeger also noted that, due to the favor­able grow­ing con­di­tions and the absence of olive pests in most pro­duc­ing regions, the qual­ity of the season’s fresh olive oils is expected to improve con­sid­er­ably this year com­pared to the pre­vi­ous one.

Ayvalik, a sig­nif­i­cant olive oil-pro­duc­ing region on Turkey’s north­west­ern Aegean coast and home to two mil­lion olive trees, is expected to pro­duce a boun­ti­ful olive oil crop this sea­son. However, the absence of rain­fall in the area has become a crit­i­cal fac­tor in deter­min­ing the final yields.

“The quan­tity of olive oil will sub­stan­tially increase this year,” said Mustafa Kürlek of Köklü Zeytincilik, an olive oil and table olive pro­ducer in the region’s Kaz Mountains.

“But the rains have not yet come,” he added. ​“As a result, the olives are sub­stan­tially wrin­kled now. Should the rains not fall, there will be a sig­nif­i­cant decrease in edi­ble olives, result­ing in more olives being chan­neled to olive oil pro­duc­tion. In the end, more olive oil will be avail­able on the mar­ket.”

Kürlek also deter­mined that Turkey’s national olive oil pro­duc­tion in 2024/25 will likely dou­ble com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year and total around 400,000 tons.

Across Turkey, the pat­tern of this year’s expected olive oil yield varies from region to region due to the lin­ger­ing drought in much of the coun­try.

A boun­ti­ful har­vest is expected in some pro­duc­ing regions, includ­ing the south­ern province of Kilis, where pro­duc­tion is expected to increase to 10,000 tons of olive oil from 6,000 tons last year.

However, some other areas, such as the Edremit Gulf in the north­west, are fac­ing a smaller crop than ini­tially expected due to insuf­fi­cient autumn rain.

Meanwhile, the record pro­duc­tion expected in Turkey in 2024/25 has also sparked ambi­tions for record olive oil exports from the coun­try this year, par­tic­u­larly after the export ban on Turkish bulk olive oil exports has been com­pletely lifted.

“The his­tor­i­cal yield obliges us to break his­tor­i­cal records in exports,” said Mehmet Emre Uygun, the chair­man of the Aegean Olive and Olive Oil Exporters’ Association (EZZIB).

Uygun added that the association’s tar­get for the 2024/25 sea­son is to increase Turkish olive exports to 200,000 tons. According to EZZIB, Turkish olive oil exports amounted to 65,000 tons in the pre­vi­ous 2023/24 year.

“In the next five-year term, we will day and night ramp up our annual exports to $1.5 bil­lion (€1.39 bil­lion),” he said.

• Anadolu Agency
• Son Muhur
• Turkish Agrinews