Despite Drought, Uruguay Anticipates Record Harvest

As the 2022/23 crop year ended in Uruguay, the small South American coun­try was in the inter­na­tional spot­light due to its ongo­ing drought.

Large swaths of the coun­try, includ­ing its two most pop­u­lous depart­ments, home to 53 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, ran out of potable water.

However, the largest olive-grow­ing regions were less affected, and pre­lim­i­nary esti­mates indi­cate the coun­try pro­duced 3,000 tons of olive oil.

The Santa Lucía River, the pri­mary water source for the cap­i­tal, Montevideo, and the neigh­bor­ing depart­ment of Canelones, vir­tu­ally dried up.

While some sense of nor­malcy may return as the world enters El Niño, which is asso­ci­ated with above-aver­age lev­els of pre­cip­i­ta­tion in Uruguay, and a new desalin­iza­tion plant comes online to make the cap­i­tal city’s water potable again, Uruguay’s lead­ing olive grow­ing regions enjoyed near-per­fect con­di­tions.

“The cli­mate was quite favor­able dur­ing the har­vest sea­son, with­out rain, with­out humid­ity, with healthy fruit and bet­ter oil yields,” Sergio Gómez, the chief exec­u­tive of Onoser, who advises many of the coun­try’s pro­duc­ers, told Olive Oil Times.

“This cam­paign, we are around 20 mil­lion kilo­grams of olives, with a yield of 13 to 19 per­cent depend­ing on the farm,” he added. ​“I con­sider the increas­ingly accu­rate and adjusted tech­ni­cal man­age­ment indica­tive that the pro­duc­tive ceil­ing for planted hectares is becom­ing less and less lim­ited.”

In Maldonado, the south­east­ern depart­ment home to 80 per­cent of the country’s olive groves, pro­duc­ers echoed Gómez’s sen­ti­ment.

“This has been a har­vest with a large quan­tity of fruit,” Martin Robaina, the co-owner of Olivos de las Ánimas, told Olive Oil Times. ​“Unlike what other areas of the agri­cul­tural sec­tor have been suf­fer­ing dur­ing the har­vest period, we did very well because there was lit­tle rain.”

“That allowed us to har­vest the olives unin­ter­rupted and min­i­mized the pres­ence of fun­gus on the fruit, yield­ing health­ier fruit and there­fore higher qual­ity olive oil,” he added.

Robaina said he trans­formed about 600 tons of olives har­vested from his groves and pur­chased from other local grow­ers this year.

“Our biggest chal­lenge was the quan­tity of fruit we har­vested this year,” he said. ​“Last year, our har­vest was much lower, which implied more work this year, more peo­ple and a higher level of pro­fes­sion­al­ism to achieve a high-qual­ity prod­uct.”

“This year, we worked for two months with three shifts at the mill to keep going for 24 hours,” Robaina added.

About 250 kilo­me­ters north of Robaina’s mill, in the depart­ment of Cerro Largo, the pro­duc­ers behind Olivares de Santa Laura also enjoyed a bumper crop and attrib­uted the yield to ideal cli­matic con­di­tions.

“This year has been a great year for Uruguay and Olivares de Santa Laura in par­tic­u­lar, great quan­tity and qual­ity,” co-owner Gonzalo Aguirre, also the pres­i­dent of the Uruguayan Olive Association, told Olive Oil Times. ​“The drier weather helped us to extend the quan­tity of early-har­vest oil.”

Olivares de Santa Laura is located near the country’s north­ern bor­der with Brazil, and Aguirre is seek­ing to take advan­tage of the bumper crop to expand his exports.

He also attempts to par­lay inter­na­tional recog­ni­tion, includ­ing con­sec­u­tive Best in Class Awards at the 2018 and 2019 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, into a new oleo­tourism ini­tia­tive.

“We have sev­eral sales options in Brazil, and we are devel­op­ing oleo­tourism,” he said. ​“We have made a sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment in an event hall, and dur­ing the har­vest, we have orga­nized vis­its that we call the ​‘Santa Laura Experience.’ We want to con­tinue explor­ing this path.”

Back in the south­east, one of the coun­try’s two largest pro­duc­ers reported its sec­ond-best year in terms of yield vol­umes.

“And for the third con­sec­u­tive year, we achieved very good pro­duc­tion lev­els,” María Morín, the mar­ket­ing man­ager at Nuevo Manatial, which pro­duces Olivares de Rocha, told Olive Oil Times.

“Until 2020, we had been expe­ri­enc­ing a very strong pro­duc­tion alter­na­tion, with year-to-year vari­a­tions of more than 50 per­cent, but in the last three years, the dif­fer­ences were less than 50 per­cent, and we are con­vinced that it is some­thing that we can main­tain in the future,” she added.

Morín attrib­uted the company’s larger and more con­sis­tent yields to changes in their fer­til­iza­tion sys­tem, improved prun­ing tech­niques, under­tak­ing an early har­vest and improved san­i­tary man­age­ment.

“On the other hand, the qual­ity obtained this year is excep­tional; we are happy with the sen­sory pro­files we are obtain­ing,” she said.

After his­tor­i­cally poor har­vests were recorded across the Mediterranean basin, Morín said the company’s bumper har­vest has allowed them to pur­sue export oppor­tu­ni­ties in two heav­ily import-depen­dent mar­kets: Brazil and the United States.

“This year, we have a great com­mer­cial oppor­tu­nity ahead of us since extra vir­gin olive oil is lack­ing in the world, and prices are at record lev­els,” she said. ​“We have the chal­lenge of, on the one hand, main­tain­ing sup­ply to our his­tor­i­cal cus­tomers, but on the other hand, tak­ing advan­tage of this oppor­tu­nity to enter cus­tomers who are now look­ing for new sup­pli­ers.”

“We are dis­trib­ut­ing very well in Brazil, where Olivares de Rocha is already a rec­og­nized brand, and since last year we have also achieved a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence in the United States, these two being our main export mar­kets,” Morín added.

One of the most sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges fac­ing the com­pany is how to most effec­tively take advan­tage of the unprece­dented oppor­tu­ni­ties pre­sent­ing them­selves to the small South American coun­try, which is home to 3.4 mil­lion peo­ple.

While pro­duc­ers on Uruguay’s east­ern and south­east­ern coast­line said the hot and dry weather of the pre­vi­ous sum­mer (which stretches from December to March in the Southern Hemisphere) helped to bol­ster yields, some of their coun­ter­parts in the country’s inte­rior cited drought as one of their main chal­lenges.

“The drought that has affected all of Uruguay in 2022/23 has reached extreme val­ues, espe­cially in the depart­ment of Florida, par­tially com­pro­mis­ing the quan­tity of cur­dled olives and the final ton­nage,” María Vittoria Saccarello, the busi­ness devel­op­ment direc­tor of Pique Roto, told Olive Oil Times.

“Of the four plan­ta­tions (for a total of around 60,000 trees) present in Casupá, only one has an irri­ga­tion sys­tem and saw its water reserve run out a month before har­vest,” she added. ​“Therefore, the har­vest in the depart­ment of Florida, although remain­ing at good lev­els, is against the trend com­pared to the other olive-grow­ing areas of the coun­try, and in 2023 it has not reached the lev­els of the pre­vi­ous har­vest.”

While Vittoria Saccarello said she har­vested fewer fruits this year, she added that the dry weather resulted in 18 to 22 per­cent above-aver­age yields in some of her Italian vari­eties.

As a result, she said the qual­ity of what was obtained was very high, ​“with more accen­tu­ated bit­ter­ness and spici­ness com­pared to past years.”

During the Covid-19 pan­demic and its imme­di­ate after­math, pro­duc­ers across the coun­try cited sup­ply chain issues as one of the biggest chal­lenges, espe­cially a short­age of glass bot­tles and other pack­ag­ing mate­ri­als.

However, Robaina said this sit­u­a­tion has largely been resolved. Instead, find­ing enough qual­i­fied work­ers to har­vest the steadily expand­ing num­ber of trees and quickly mill increas­ing olive yields will be the coun­try’s main chal­lenge going for­ward.

“The labor prob­lem is going to increase because the per­son spends more time in each of the trees,” he said. ​“So labor becomes more expen­sive. We will all have to tran­si­tion to total mech­a­niza­tion of the har­vest to make the busi­ness work.”