Farmers in France Confirm Grim Predictions as Harvest Gets Underway

Unusual weather con­di­tions after the flow­er­ing and dur­ing the sum­mer have affected French olive grow­ers’ expec­ta­tions for the 2022 har­vest.

Growers and experts believe the olive oil yield in the coun­try will be sig­nif­i­cantly lower com­pared to pre­vi­ous years. In August, pro­duc­ers esti­mated the har­vest would be 50 per­cent below last year’s.

“The chang­ing cli­mate is an increas­ing chal­lenge. The dry­ness we expe­ri­enced this year, cou­pled with very high tem­per­a­tures, might affect quan­tity and qual­ity in many areas,” Marie Barbé, tech­ni­cal man­ager at Domaine de Leos, a pro­ducer in Provence and NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition win­ner, told Olive Oil Times.

“At the begin­ning of the sea­son, we were very happy with the flow­er­ing, then came the winds and the heat­waves, so a lot of flow­ers dried up,” she added. ​“On top of that is the scarcity of water which has been hav­ing an impact on the devel­op­ment of the olive.”

Anthony Bérenguier, olive oil pro­duc­tion man­ager at Moulins de Callas in south­east­ern France, told local media that he expects a 20 to 60 per­cent lower yield.

“Normally, I can plan for 60 to 80 tons per year in my 12 hectares,” he said. ​“This sea­son, I do not expect to reach half of that.”

According to Olivier Nasles, pres­i­dent of the National Committee of Organic Agriculture, there will be a con­sid­er­able pro­duc­tion drop in the 2022 har­vest.

“We will have to be happy if we man­age to pro­duce 3,000 tons [of olive oil] against the 5,500 of the last sea­son,” he said.

Nasles told LeGrandPastis that such num­bers are not ​“cat­a­strophic.”

“But when we look at the behav­ior of the olive groves, we no longer fully under­stand what is hap­pen­ing,” he said, ref­er­enc­ing the increas­ingly evi­dent impact of cli­mate change on tra­di­tional olive pro­duc­tion.

Producers say that changes are com­ing to olive grow­ers, and adap­ta­tion is vital.

“In just 20 years, I have seen a lot of changes, so we have to adapt,” Barbé said. ​“For instance, you have to study the cul­ti­vars, under­stand­ing which of them are react­ing bet­ter to change.”

Jean-Benoit Hugues, the owner of Moulin Castelas in Les Baux-de-Provence, told Anadolu Agency that he expects a 50 per­cent drop in olive oil pro­duc­tion.

Hughes blamed the heat­wave suf­fered in the region. ​“We lost a lot of the har­vest, and the olives which sur­vived are too small.”

Barbé said adap­ta­tion to the chang­ing cli­mate is vital to organic farm­ing.

“During this hot, dry sum­mer, we pro­vided the trees some emer­gency irri­ga­tion but no more than that,” she said. ​“The aim is a good har­vest, of course, but I do not want to push the trees.”

“We pre­fer to fol­low nature and the sea­son, to adapt to its rhythm,” Barbé added. ​“We just aim at main­tain­ing the roots of the trees in a good state so they can pro­duce good qual­ity fruits.”

“Our approach is entirely organic,” she con­tin­ued. ​“Some organic amino acids might be used to pro­tect the trees from excess heat, and other organic farm­ing tech­niques aim to pre­vent an excess of evap­o­tran­spi­ra­tion in the field. The goal is to adapt to the cli­mate and con­tinue focus­ing on high qual­ity.”

The coun­try’s most rel­e­vant table olive and olive oil-pro­duc­ing regions are Bouches-du-Rhône, le Gard, la Drôme, le Var and le Vaucluse. All have been affected to some extent by the excep­tional weather con­di­tions of the last few months.

Eight Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) extra vir­gin olive oils are pro­duced in those regions. Such PDOs rep­re­sent approx­i­mately 27 per­cent of French olive oil pro­duc­tion.

According to France Olive, an indus­try asso­ci­a­tion, 66 per­cent of national olive oil pro­duc­tion comes from south­ern Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. Some small grow­ers man­aged to avoid the worst effects of this year’s extra­or­di­nary weather.

“The drought has hit many areas of the coun­try, and we all face the con­se­quences of an extra­or­di­nary sit­u­a­tion,” Claire Coutin, owner of Mas des Bories in Salon de Provence, told Olive Oil Times.

“In some olive-pro­duc­ing areas, grow­ers are left with no olives at all,” the NYIOOC win­ner added. ​“In our case, we were quite lucky, as we expect a very good har­vest both in qual­ity and vol­umes.”

“I say this as the num­ber of olives is way larger than last year, and I can see our trees are very healthy, I would say happy olive trees, so I expect qual­ity to be very high,” she con­tin­ued.

Coutin believes that the extra­or­di­nary weather events of last sum­mer and the pro­longed drought will influ­ence yields but will have a min­i­mal impact on qual­ity.

“With such a hot sum­mer, the olive trees have expe­ri­enced some stress, of course,” she said. ​“Still, we expect our best har­vest to come from local vari­eties such as Bouteillan and Grossane, which tra­di­tion­ally do not yield huge vol­umes.”

“This is because they do not pro­duce large amounts of olives, and their olives do not carry large quan­ti­ties of olive oil,” Coutin added. ​“However, this year, we are see­ing that they are far­ing bet­ter than usual.”

The first weeks of October will see many farm­ers begin their har­vest.

“We will prob­a­bly start har­vest­ing in mid-October, which is ear­lier than we used to do,” Coutin said, adding that the goal was to pro­duce a green fruity oil, ​“which is appre­ci­ated by our cus­tomers in the United States. Every year it seems that the right moment comes a bit ear­lier.”

According to a recent report by Meteo France, heat­waves in the coun­try are expected to increase sub­stan­tially.

In the past, such extreme events affected the coun­try every five years on aver­age, but since 2000, they have become an annual phe­nom­e­non.

Furthermore, French mete­o­rol­o­gists believe that the dura­tion of the heat waves has increased nine-fold in the last few years. In 2022, heat waves hit the coun­try for 28 days in just three months.

“The only good thing about the heat­waves is that we do not see many pests around, as the olive fruit fly does not like too warm tem­per­a­tures,” Coutin said. ​“If we talk about cli­mate events and refer only to the last two or three years, I would say that the way we man­age our orchard has been con­tin­u­ously chang­ing and adapt­ing.”

“In the face of cli­mate change, as a small pro­ducer, we have to be way more reac­tive and flex­i­ble than in the past,” she added. ​“We used to have a fixed sched­ule for har­vest­ing our olives. We knew we would have to start at the end of October with a cul­ti­var and then we would have pro­ceeded to the other ones in a spe­cific order.”

“Today, all vari­eties tend to ripen almost at the same time or, on the con­trary, they fol­low a com­pletely dif­fer­ent tim­ing,” Coutin con­tin­ued. ​“We need to be always ready.”

In south­ern France, not all grow­ers expressed opti­mism about the future, but expe­ri­enced grow­ers such as Barbé are adapt­ing to the next nor­mal.

“There will be those try­ing to use con­ven­tional means or mul­ti­ply nutri­ents on the trees to make them stay strong, but in the end, we should all know that we will have very good years and other sea­sons when the yields will be low,” Barbé said.

“In Provence, on our hills, we have an ideal ter­roir to grow olive trees as the soil is rich and rain­fall drains very well,” she added. ​“We also have weather which is usu­ally not too hot.”

“On top of that, there is the advan­tage of the impact of the sea, which is not so far, and tem­per­a­tures in win­ter are not too cold,” Barbé con­cluded. ​“Here, you can pro­duce green fruity or ripe fruity olives; both will yield very high qual­ity.”

• France TV Info
• Le Grand Patis
• Anadolu Agency