Innovation and Sustainability Yield Brilliant Results for Apulian Producers

The abil­ity to bring out the best of the autochtho­nous Coratina olive vari­ety lies at the heart of GangaLupo​’s suc­cess.

The young com­pany was founded in Bari, Puglia, aim­ing to pro­duce a top-qual­ity mono­va­ri­etal. Its efforts were again rewarded with a Gold Award at the 2024 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, the company’s sixth con­sec­u­tive dis­tinc­tion.

“Many of the trees that we care for were planted by my great-grand­fa­ther and grand­fa­ther,” said founder Vito Girone. ​“Indeed, our com­pany was recently cre­ated, but my fam­ily has been ded­i­cated to olive grow­ing for gen­er­a­tions.”

“They used to sell the olives to the local mills, and a small part of the fruit was intended for the pro­duc­tion of olive oil for domes­tic con­sump­tion,” he added. ​“The farm man­age­ment, which also pro­duces veg­eta­bles, has then been passed to our par­ents, who sup­port me and my brother in our qual­ity-ori­ented project.”

Until shortly before the company’s cre­ation, the Apulian farmer’s career had taken a dif­fer­ent path.

After high school, Girone moved to Turin, in the north­ern Italian region of Piedmont. There, he grad­u­ated and started work­ing in an engi­neer­ing firm. This lasted for a few years until an inner voice prompted him to move back.

“It was a very good job, but over time, I have real­ized that I needed a change, espe­cially since my pas­sion for olive oil made itself felt,” he said. ​“Therefore, I pro­posed to my brother Luigi, who had grad­u­ated in forestry and envi­ron­men­tal sci­ences and already worked in the fam­ily busi­ness, to launch our own pro­duc­tion of extra vir­gin olive oil.”

“He eagerly accepted, and we began rear­rang­ing the com­pany orga­ni­za­tion,” Girone added. ​“Since we had just basic knowl­edge of how to make olive oil, we turned to an exter­nal con­sul­tant, Alfredo Marasciulo, an expert in qual­ity pro­duc­tion. Seeing our strong belief in the project, he agreed to sup­port us, and we started in the 2017/18 crop year.”

Today, the farm cov­ers 25 hectares in Santo Spirito, the north­ern­most dis­trict of the Apulian cap­i­tal city. There, 5,500 olive trees flour­ish on flat land less than a kilo­me­ter from the Adriatic Sea.

The orchards are located in a ham­let called Ganga di Lupo, from which the company’s name derives. Over half of the trees are cen­turies old and still retain a tra­di­tional plant­ing pat­tern, with a spac­ing of at least six by seven meters. Younger trees have been placed in some areas to thicken the orchards.

“In the olive grove, we installed two weather con­trol units that detect air and soil humid­ity,” Girone said. ​“We also added leaf sen­sors that allow us to mon­i­tor the growth of the leaves and avoid ther­mal and water stress in the plants.”

This Agriculture 4.0 sys­tem helps to opti­mize resources and work­loads. Girone and his brother plan to install a sub­sur­face irri­ga­tion sys­tem to save water and energy, replac­ing the drip sys­tem in the orchards.

“Being sus­tain­able is one of our core val­ues, and there­fore, we pay strict atten­tion to the effi­cient use of resources,” Girone said. ​“Studies say that with drip irri­ga­tion, the water lost to evap­o­ra­tion can reach 40 to 50 per­cent.”

“This does not hap­pen with sub­sur­face irri­ga­tion, which low­ers water con­sump­tion and, con­se­quently, energy con­sump­tion since the booster pumps have to pump less water for less time from the well,” he added. ​“By the next olive har­vest, this sys­tem should come into oper­a­tion in some orchards.”

Girone believes that his com­pany and the olive oil sec­tor can no longer afford to con­tinue using unsus­tain­able farm­ing prac­tices.

“To make a qual­ity prod­uct, you need water, but cli­mate change has reduced its avail­abil­ity,” he said. ​“With less rain and declin­ing aquifer lev­els, farm­ers must be care­ful about water con­sump­tion and man­age­ment. Otherwise, there is a risk that this pre­cious resource will no longer be avail­able for agri­cul­ture.”

Drought threat­ened last year’s pro­duc­tion. A rainy spring was fol­lowed by a pro­longed dry spell from June to November, requir­ing a higher water and energy input.

Nevertheless, the extra efforts paid off, and the olive yield was sat­is­fac­tory. Coratina is a late-matur­ing vari­ety, but Girone car­ries out an early har­vest, which usu­ally starts in the first days of November and ends by mid-December.

“To achieve such results, we rely on one of the best mills in the area,” Girone said. ​“In his facil­ity in Modugno, Donato Conserva, also known as Mimì, pro­vides us with the best tech­nol­ogy avail­able today. There is a plan to build our own com­pany mill, per­haps in a cou­ple of years, but we will take one step at a time for now and con­tinue to work with these great pro­fes­sion­als.”

Girone attrib­utes the company’s suc­cess to the com­ple­men­tary skill sets he, his brother and his par­ents pos­sess.

“In cre­at­ing our com­pany, I com­bined all of our exper­tise, namely my par­ents’ life­time expe­ri­ence in the coun­try, my brother’s agri­cul­tural knowl­edge and my engi­neer­ing skills, espe­cially in imple­ment­ing a pre­ci­sion farm­ing model, in addi­tion to the abil­i­ties of our col­lab­o­ra­tors,” he said. Working in a team can be a win­ning choice even for a small com­pany.”

Girone attrib­uted this busi­ness strat­egy to the award-win­ning results the com­pany has achieved over the years.

“The awards obtained give us the great­est sat­is­fac­tion,” he said. ​“They not only indi­cate that we are doing a good job but also give pres­tige to our image. And we suc­ceeded in this despite the dif­fi­cul­ties that all farm­ers like us have encoun­tered in recent years, from the ever-more-fre­quent extreme weather events to the increased pro­duc­tion costs.”

Girone revealed that at the begin­ning of the sales sea­son, he was wor­ried that ris­ing olive oil prices might scare the con­sumers. However, he real­ized that a good part of them truly under­stood the value of pre­mium prod­ucts and con­tin­ued to buy and use them despite the cost increases.

“The fact is that the prices of sub­stan­dard prod­ucts have also gone up,” he said. ​“In sub­stance, the dif­fer­ence between the prices of high-qual­ity and poor-qual­ity prod­ucts has nar­rowed a lot, and con­sumers began to under­stand that, under these con­di­tions, it is worth buy­ing a high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil.”

Girone noted that the great com­mu­ni­ca­tion from olive oil pro­fes­sion­als also made peo­ple aware of what lies behind qual­ity pro­duc­tion and its many ben­e­fits.

“Ever more con­sumers know that a high-qual­ity prod­uct makes a world of dif­fer­ence both at the table and in terms of the health ben­e­fits,” he said. ​“We see a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple dis­cov­er­ing this qual­ity world.”

“There is a greater aware­ness than in the past that a qual­ity prod­uct is not just a com­mod­ity, but the fruit of a work of care, atten­tion and respect for ter­ri­tory and com­mu­ni­ties,” Girone added. ​“Indeed, this is prob­a­bly a key moment for the sec­tor, in which we can make a large num­ber of peo­ple aware of the dif­fer­ences between a high-qual­ity prod­uct and a low-qual­ity one.”

The Apulian farmer said he could not imag­ine a life dif­fer­ent from the one he is liv­ing thanks to extra vir­gin olive oil. He added that he is com­mit­ted to improv­ing and exploit­ing today’s inno­va­tions to improve qual­ity and sus­tain­abil­ity.

“I believe that in our work, there are fun­da­men­tal points that we must keep in sight, and one of these is respect for the envi­ron­ment,” Girone said. ​“Certainly, today’s inno­va­tions help us reach the high­est lev­els of qual­ity and be more pro­duc­tive, but I believe that we should not overdo it. We must always treat the envi­ron­ment and the ter­ri­tory that gives us this extra­or­di­nary prod­uct with great care.”

“Through the reduc­tion of emis­sions and effi­cient resource use, we can be a sus­tain­able com­pany in every sense and still aim for the high­est qual­ity stan­dards,” he con­cluded.