Complex Harvest Challenges Italian Farmers

The first fig­ures avail­able on the cur­rent crop sea­son in Italy were com­piled and released by the Institute of Services for the Agricultural and Food Market (ISMEA), on the basis of data gath­ered by the Italian Agricultural Payments Agency (AGEA). According to the early indi­ca­tions from the mon­i­tor­ing net­work, yet in absence of objec­tive fac­tors such as yield, the olive oil pro­duc­tion vol­ume for the 2018/19 har­vest sea­son has been esti­mated to reach 265,000 tons, which is equiv­a­lent to a 38 per­cent decline com­pared to the 429,000 tons for last year.

However, spe­cial­ists at the Institute fore­cast that a fur­ther decrease up to 45 per­cent may occur by the end of the oper­a­tions in the Italian olive groves since weather con­di­tions could affect yield and qual­ity of fruits. Actually, as the har­vest pro­ceeds and enters the final phase, a fur­ther decline in vol­umes appears increas­ingly likely, and some experts say this year’s pro­duc­tion could hit a record low.

As men­tioned in the Ismea’s report, tak­ing into account the phe­nom­e­non of alter­nate bear­ing in olive trees, over the last six years the ​‘off-years’ always occurred with a drop in pro­duc­tion with an inten­sity that exceeded the phys­i­o­log­i­cal vari­a­tion.

This was due to the action of sev­eral fac­tors which con­tributed to sig­nif­i­cant down­turns, as was the case of the 222,000 tons pro­duced in 2014, a sea­son char­ac­ter­ized by the mas­sive pres­ence of the olive fruit fly, fol­lowed by the 182,000 tons of 2016, the worst har­vest in recent decades. Experts point out that, in the his­tory of Italian olive grow­ing, neg­a­tive sea­sons gen­er­ally occurred every 15 years, while in recent times, due to the increas­ing fre­quency of anom­alous cli­matic events, they have become more fre­quent.

Eager to keep the qual­ity up, pro­duc­ers have begun to carry out strict mon­i­tor­ing of olive groves and take timely action when nec­es­sary in order to pre­vent dis­eases, ensure ade­quate irri­ga­tion and pick olives at the right moment. During the cur­rent har­vest, it turns out that vari­eties usu­ally left on the trees until November have been col­lected at the end of September. For exam­ple, Carolea and Coratina required early oper­a­tions in sev­eral areas. Overall, how­ever, from north to south, activ­i­ties in the olive groves started ear­lier than usual.

South Italy par­tic­u­larly suf­fered from the effects of extreme weather events, start­ing from the Siberian cold wave that hit European coun­tries at the end of win­ter, and posed a threat to olive trees, espe­cially vari­eties whose grow­ing sea­son started early. In some cases, the recov­ery from severe frost dam­age to an olive tree could take years.

According to pre­lim­i­nary assess­ments, north­ern regions could expe­ri­ence an increase in pro­duc­tion thanks to good results achieved in Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Liguria, while cen­tral Italy will see a slight decline in vol­umes, despite the good per­for­mances of Umbria and Tuscany. In these areas, some grow­ers reported that vari­eties like Frantoio suf­fered more from the extreme tem­per­a­tures, while Moraiolo has shown a greater resis­tance. Regions like Abruzzo reg­is­tered a bet­ter sit­u­a­tion in the coastal strip than the inland areas, while ter­ri­to­ries such as lower Lazio region suf­fered from humid­ity, which hin­dered an opti­mal set­ting.

According to the newly cre­ated con­sor­tium Italia Olivicola, the reduced vol­umes of prod­uct reg­is­tered to date have led to the loss of over one mil­lion work­ing days, as a result of the cut­ting of work­ing hours for those involved in har­vest­ing and milling oper­a­tional phases.

Concerning prices, they imme­di­ately reacted to the expected down­turn, but we have to wait a few more days to have defin­i­tive fig­ures and a com­pre­hen­sive overview of what will be cer­tainly a com­plex sea­son for Italian grow­ers.

• ISMEA