Dry Heat Followed by Torrential Rain Curb Croatian Yields

Despite a chal­leng­ing har­vest, olive grow­ers and millers across Croatia are opti­mistic about qual­ity.

A hot and dry sum­mer fol­lowed by heavy rain­fall com­pli­cated the har­vest for pro­duc­ers and resulted in millers report­ing dis­ap­point­ing con­ver­sion yields.

“The qual­ity of the pro­duced olive oil is out­ra­geous,” said Rudolf Nemetschke, co-owner of Avistria. ​“The oil is very fruity and has an inten­sive ​‘green’ color and taste – green tomato, herbs, green leaves. The qual­ity is the best in ten years.”

Avistria pro­duces extra vir­gin olive oil in Sveti Lovrec, in the heart of Istria, the large penin­sula in the north­ern Adriatic Sea. The com­pany cul­ti­vates almost 10,000 trees over 35 hectares.

“The milling per­cent­ages were dis­as­trous this year,” Nemetschke explained, refer­ring to the con­ver­sion yields.

Meanwhile, fel­low Istrian pro­ducer Mili Kus, co-owner of Olivo Monte Cucco, said the 2024/25 crop year had been the most dif­fi­cult yet due to the sum­mer heat and drought fol­lowed by weeks of heavy rain.

“Looking at the first rain­fall, one could have hoped it could ben­e­fit the har­vest. But, apart from some addi­tional col­oration on the olives, it did not hap­pen,” Kus said. ​“Such heavy rain­fall ended up impact­ing the ripen­ing process of the fruits. It just stopped.”

“Heavy rain­fall also impacted the soil, which made har­vest­ing way more dif­fi­cult as mud was all over,” she added. ​“Still, I believe the olive oil qual­ity this year is out of this world.”

The hot and dry sum­mer, fol­lowed by tor­ren­tial rains in the autumn, com­pli­cated the har­vest for regional pro­duc­ers.

“Our Buza olive oil had a per­cent­age of 5.4 per­cent,” Nemetschke remarked, refer­ring to the con­ver­sion yield, deter­mined by how many kilo­grams of olive oil are pro­duced from 100 kilo­grams of fruits.

“The num­bers for Istarska Bjelica and Leccino were bet­ter, with the aver­age num­ber being approx­i­mately 8.5 per­cent,” Nemetschke said. ​“Such num­bers are not sat­is­fy­ing, although low num­bers were expected due to the sum­mer heat wave.”

“We fear a clear price increase of extra vir­gin olive oil in Istria, as all pro­duc­ers have more or less the same sit­u­a­tion,” he added.

Croatia pro­duced about 3,500 tons of olive oil in the 2023/24 crop year. According to European Union data, Croatia has pro­duced an aver­age of 3,800 tons annu­ally over the past decade.

“The extreme sum­mer drought and excep­tion­ally high tem­per­a­tures were not favor­able for pests, and as a result, the olive fruit fly was not observed at all this year,” said Tedi Chiavalon, co-owner of OPG Chiavalon.

“Those con­di­tions led to an extremely healthy crop and incred­i­ble qual­ity of extra vir­gin olive oils, not just on our estate but across the entire region,” he added.

Chiavalon’s fam­ily groves include approx­i­mately 9,000 olive trees cov­er­ing more than 30 hectares in the Vodnjan area of Istria. He con­firmed that con­ver­sion yields were extremely low.

“Such low yields have not been recorded in recent his­tory, and despite a good har­vest, the total pro­duc­tion of olive oil in Istria will ulti­mately be lower than usual,” Chiavalon said.

“Due to the excep­tion­ally high tem­per­a­tures dur­ing the sum­mer and the pro­longed dry period with­out rain, we expected slightly lower yields, but not to the extent we wit­nessed in the end,” he added.

According to data from the Croatian gov­ern­ment, the coun­try boasts about 20,000 hectares of olive groves, almost half of which cor­re­spond to native vari­eties. The major­ity of Croatian olive oil pro­duc­tion comes from small fam­ily-owned farms.

The National Bureau of Statistics’ lat­est report noted that in 2024, more than half of the olive oil con­sumed in the coun­try was imported.

In October, aver­age extra vir­gin olive oil prices in the coun­try were still ris­ing, up to €14 per liter.

“The biggest chal­lenge this sea­son was the drought that affected cer­tain parts of the island and the sur­round­ing areas,” said Josipa Visković, the event and com­mu­ni­ca­tion man­ager at OPG Seca. ​“In some areas, it did not rain for almost five months, which has threat­ened the sur­vival of this year’s fruit.”

OPG Seca is an award-win­ning olive farm located on the island of Hvar, off the Dalmatian coast, where it cul­ti­vates about 1,000 olive trees.

“Given the impos­si­bil­ity of irri­ga­tion and the unavail­abil­ity of a ded­i­cated water infra­struc­ture, we are impacted by cli­matic con­di­tions that threaten the olive trees with dry­ing,” Visković said.

“Nevertheless, nature has blessed us with rain at the cru­cial and very last moment, so the olives were suc­cess­fully saved, and the oil man­aged to develop in the fruit,” she added.

Visković stressed the high qual­ity of the olive oil, cel­e­brated in a tra­di­tional end-of-har­vest event that is part of the com­pa­ny’s many activ­i­ties to pro­mote the island’s olive oil cul­ture.