Meet the Start-Ups in Central Italy Reviving Abandoned Olive Groves

Initiatives to recover aban­doned olive groves in Italy have increased over recent years, going hand in hand with grow­ing aware­ness about the envi­ron­men­tal value of the olive tree.

Various orga­ni­za­tions are com­mit­ted to restora­tion projects by cre­at­ing olive tree adop­tion plans for cit­i­zens and com­pa­nies pur­su­ing cor­po­rate social respon­si­bil­ity pro­grams. Local com­mu­ni­ties trea­sure the revived groves as new col­lec­tive spaces.

In Tuscany, the start-up Ager Oliva was started to give new life to the mil­lions of aban­doned olive trees in the region while fight­ing cli­mate change, together with com­pa­nies that aim to off­set their car­bon diox­ide emis­sions.

“The love for the olive trees has been passed on to me by my grand­fa­ther, who pro­duced olive oil. Since I was a kid, my desire was to cre­ate a com­pany of my own in the sec­tor,” Tommaso Dami, an econ­o­mist and the founder of Ager Oliva, told Olive Oil Times. ​“When I read the data about mil­lions of aban­doned olive trees in our region, I real­ized I could do some­thing to address this issue.”

“The land aban­don­ment is due to a lack of gen­er­a­tional turnover,” he added. ​“Many of those who find them­selves inher­it­ing small or large plots of land are unable to man­age them due to pre-exist­ing work and fam­ily com­mit­ments and also because they can­not afford the ever-grow­ing pro­duc­tion costs. Then, I came up with the idea of long-dis­tance adop­tions, which became a con­crete project after 2020.”

Immediately after the Covid-19 pan­demic lock­down was lifted in Italy, Dami cre­ated a team with Ana Soto, an expert in sus­tain­able tourism, and Cosimo Lunetti, a video­g­ra­pher and drone pilot.

After cre­at­ing the web­site and set­ting up the social media pro­file, they con­ducted an adver­tis­ing cam­paign to test the mar­ket’s reac­tion, which was very pos­i­tive both in Italy and abroad. Then, they founded their inno­v­a­tive agri­cul­tural startup in March 2021.

“We started recov­er­ing olive groves in Pistoia, Montecatini and Florence, in par­tic­u­lar those located on the foothills of Montalbano close to Leonardo Da Vinci’s birth­place,” Dami said.

“The first 700 trees were all recov­ered in just three months after the launch of the startup. Of these olive trees, 400 were adopted by CPL Concordia, a large com­pany based in Emilia-Romagna, spe­cial­iz­ing in energy sys­tems man­age­ment,” he added. ​“They con­tacted us after read­ing an arti­cle about our project in the local news­pa­per and soon became our clients. They have been sup­port­ing us for three years, and from next year, they will eval­u­ate join­ing our new plant­ing pro­gram in Italy.”

Their new project con­sists of plant­ing olive trees on fal­low lands in Tuscany and other regions of Italy and man­ag­ing the new groves over the fol­low­ing years.

The aim is also to expand the extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duc­tion. The Ager Oliva team is now in talks to take over man­ag­ing an area of 3,000 hectares of uncul­ti­vated land in Lazio.

“By financ­ing the olive tree plan­ta­tion and entrust­ing us with multi-year man­age­ment, the com­pa­nies have the oppor­tu­nity to com­pen­sate car­bon diox­ide through a zero-kilo­me­ter, nature-based and sci­en­tif­i­cally val­i­dated sys­tem,” Dami said.

“We offer them not only a way to off­set car­bon emis­sions but also to do team build­ing activ­i­ties in the field with the employ­ees and pro­tect bio­di­ver­sity, he added. ​“With the lat­ter option, they can obtain bio­di­ver­sity cred­its and give them as gifts to their employ­ees.”

After pre­sent­ing Ager Oliva at the World Economic Forum annual meet­ing in 2023, the team will attend the event for the sec­ond time to unveil the lat­est devel­op­ments and upcom­ing projects.

The startup has recov­ered 12 hectares of olive trees, mainly cen­turies-old, and plans to restore another 25 hectares within the fol­low­ing year.

In almost three years, more than 500 tons of car­bon diox­ide have been removed from the envi­ron­ment, accord­ing to cal­cu­la­tions by the University of Florence and the National Research Center of Florence.

The star­tup’s projects can be sup­ported by both com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als, who, every har­vest sea­son, are com­pen­sated with the high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duced from the recov­ered olive trees. Their fruits are crushed in a two-phase state-of-the-art mill in Quarrata in the province of Pistoia.

“In addi­tion to the three of us, there are an office staff and exter­nal col­lab­o­ra­tors,” Dami said. ​“We have a well-struc­tured orga­ni­za­tion that allows us to man­age many plants, also con­sid­er­ing that we are expand­ing the num­ber of groves to recover and man­age.”

Another mis­sion of Ager Oliva is to spread the extra vir­gin olive oil cul­ture and raise aware­ness about envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion dur­ing events orga­nized in the recov­ered orchards.

“We orga­nize events with the sup­port­ers, includ­ing stu­dents at pub­lic schools,” Dami said. ​“Some schools have already requested pic­nics and envi­ron­men­tal edu­ca­tional tours for next spring.”

“We will bring the stu­dents to visit the Leonardo da Vinci muse­ums and then the olive groves, where they will take part in a day of envi­ron­men­tal and cul­tural train­ing focused on the key role of the olive tree in the ter­ri­tory and the ben­e­fits of extra vir­gin olive oil,” he added.

In Umbria, Le Olivastre was estab­lished in 2014 to restore ancient aban­doned olive groves on the banks of Lake Trasimeno.

A fem­i­nine ver­sion of the Italian word for oleaster, namely the wild olive tree, is the name cho­sen by the founders for their non-profit asso­ci­a­tion, which recently added a name­sake cater­ing busi­ness.

“My two friends and I had moved to Passignano sul Trasimeno, in the province of Perugia, from other Italian regions, and as often hap­pens to non-local peo­ple who see places with new eyes, we fell in love at first sight with this land­scape, which indeed is of a unique beauty,” co-founder Emanuela De Stefanis told Olive Oil Times.

“We used to walk along some orchards not far from our houses, where those aban­doned cen­turies-old olive trees stood out, and over time, we started won­der­ing if we could do some­thing use­ful for the place that wel­comed us,” she added.

Hence, they decided to col­lect the fruits that oth­er­wise would have fallen on the ground with­out being used, and they deliv­ered them to a mill in the area to obtain some extra vir­gin olive oil.

“We real­ized that to be help­ful to the com­mu­nity, we should have given con­ti­nu­ity to our activ­ity of preser­va­tion and pro­duc­tion,” she said. ​“Then we offered to man­age a few more aban­doned plots, both pri­vate and pub­lic, with the help of our fam­i­lies and friends. Moreover, some elders in the vil­lage were kind enough to give us some advice.”

It was only nat­ural for them to start study­ing and attend­ing courses to become tasters and pruners and learn milling tech­niques. They estab­lished part­ner­ships with a group of agron­o­mists and cre­ated the asso­ci­a­tion.

“We were just in time for a very dif­fi­cult olive crop year when a major attack of the olive fruit fly occurred through­out the coun­try,” De Stefanis said. ​“We orga­nized pub­lic meet­ings with the sup­port of the phy­tosan­i­tary ser­vice of the Umbria region and other pro­fes­sion­als, where we explained to the olive grow­ers, often ama­teur farm­ers, the impact of the olive fly on the fruit and the avail­able pre­ven­tion and defense sys­tems. I am glad to say that we became a point of ref­er­ence for many small farm­ers.”

The first orchard recov­ered, the his­toric olive grove of San Crispolto dat­ing to the 18^th cen­tury, included 250 cen­turies-old Dolce Agogia trees, a typ­i­cal vari­ety of Lake Trasimeno.

Over the years, with the help of vol­un­teers and sea­sonal col­lab­o­ra­tors, Le Olivastre suc­ceeded in regen­er­at­ing six olive groves with more than 1,500 trees of autochtho­nous vari­eties. Their fruits are crushed in a mill in Castiglione del Lago that boasts the lat­est tech­nol­ogy.

Today, the asso­ci­a­tion led by De Stefanis with Paola Sticchi and Antonella Panciarola includes Italian and inter­na­tional mem­bers. To these are added the adopters, who can choose the name of their olive trees and, at the end of the har­vest sea­son, receive the extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duced from the restored orchards.

“Adopters are both pri­vate indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies,” De Stefanis said. ​“Last year, a big extra vir­gin olive oil bot­tling com­pany, Costa d’Oro, adopted sev­eral trees, one for each of its employ­ees, in the frame­work of a cor­po­rate social respon­si­bil­ity pro­gram.”

One of the last small orchards the asso­ci­a­tion recov­ered is on steep ter­rain with a won­der­ful lake view. Indeed, one of Le Olivastre’s objec­tives is to safe­guard the land­scape, besides pre­serv­ing the local bio­di­ver­sity.

“We are car­ry­ing out a true restora­tion of the ter­ri­tory, and our idea is to cre­ate paths through­out the groves that can be used for light hikes,” De Stefanis said. ​“We have already orga­nized some ini­tia­tives inside the olive grove, and we invite our mem­bers to pro­pose social events because the recov­ered olive groves are meant to be places for the com­mu­nity.”

“Moreover, we recently revived a veg­etable gar­den in San Feliciano where we pro­duce saf­fron, and this activ­ity opened us up to the other prod­ucts of the lake,” she added. ​“Then, we made the step of propos­ing our own cui­sine with olive oil at its heart.”

“With a food truck, we bring our qual­ity street food, which is pre­pared using cheese, bread, wine and extra vir­gin olive oils made by other farm­ers from the lake, to the local events,” De Stefanis con­cluded. ​“On these occa­sions, we orga­nize olive oil tast­ings with the goal of dis­sem­i­nat­ing the cul­ture of high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil.”