Italian Farmers, Producers Confirm Production Rebound

According to the lat­est update from the European Commission, Italian olive oil pro­duc­tion is expected to reach 324,000 tons in the 2023/24 crop year.

Due to poor har­vests in Spain and Greece, Italy is antic­i­pated to pro­duce one-third of Europe’s olive oil this year. Furthermore, an esti­mated 75 per­cent of the country’s pro­duc­tion meets the extra vir­gin olive oil grade.

The com­mis­sion fig­ures also con­firm expec­ta­tions that Italian pro­duc­ers reported to Olive Oil Times in October, just as the har­vest was under­way.

The fruit­ful har­vest will also replen­ish olive oil stocks in the coun­try. According to the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forests, Italian extra vir­gin olive oil stor­age is now more than 200,000 tons, far exceed­ing the 96,000 tons reported in October.

Overall, Italian stocks of all grades of olive oil reached 269,574 tons at the end of January, a 14 per­cent increase from December 2023. Organic olive oil stocks account for 40,552 tons. Still, olive oil stocks remain 14.5 per­cent lower than at the same period of the pre­vi­ous year.

While olive oil pro­duc­tion reached the pre­vi­ous decade’s aver­age in 2023/24, yields var­ied enor­mously among regions.

Excessive rain­fall and extreme weather events, such as repeated heat­waves, dimin­ished pro­duc­tion in much of cen­tral and north­ern Italy, with the south­ern regions far­ing much bet­ter.

In the north­ern region of Lombardy, grow­ers faced some of the harsh­est cli­matic con­di­tions.

“We did not have any­thing to har­vest,” Paul Willan, owner of Roveglio, told Olive Oil Times. ​“We lost the whole pro­duc­tion because of three dev­as­tat­ing hail­storms. No pro­duc­tion on more than 1,000 olive trees.”

Those extreme events were felt both in the coun­try and in the cities. ​“In Como, a city [not far from Roveglio’s farm], the hail was so large that it broke glass and dam­aged pho­to­voltaic pan­els,” Willan said.

“On top of that, hail­storms brought infec­tions from Pseudomonas savas­tanoi, which is spread­ing across the whole area,” he added about the bac­terium respon­si­ble for the olive knot dis­ease.

In the north­east­ern region of Veneto, olive oil yields are reported to be slightly bet­ter than else­where in north­ern Italy.

“We had a nor­mal har­vest this year, and we are very happy with the qual­ity,” Johannes Pan, mar­ket­ing man­ager of Paneolio, told Olive Oil Times. ​“The vol­ume was nor­mal com­pared to pre­vi­ous years.”

However, he warned that the endur­ing drought expe­ri­enced in the region means olive oil pro­duc­tion has ​“become more and more dif­fi­cult every year. The effort required to achieve good results is becom­ing ever greater.”

“It is becom­ing increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to rely on weather fore­casts, and with­out tech­ni­cal sup­port, many things in agri­cul­ture would prob­a­bly no longer be pos­si­ble as they were ten years ago,” Pan added.

On the oppo­site side of north­ern Italy, grow­ers in Liguria, known for their Taggiasca olives, also lamented the effects of the ongo­ing dry cli­mate.

“Due to drought, the olive har­vest was dis­as­trous in terms of vol­ume,” Nicola Ferrarese, the co-owner of Tèra de Prie, told Olive Oil Times. ​“Thanks to some late rain­fall, though, the qual­ity is extra­or­di­nary.”

“The sig­nif­i­cant bit­ter note linked to a dry-con­di­tion defect from last year gave way to a spec­tac­u­lar Taggiasca,” he added.

Other sig­nif­i­cant cen­tral Italian olive oil-pro­duc­ing regions, such as Umbria, Tuscany and Lazio, reported mixed results.

“The har­vest was not good for qual­ity and vol­umes, which dropped about 40 per­cent com­pared to last year,” Massimo Romiti, owner of the Umbrian pro­ducer La Madon­nuc­cia, told Olive Oil Times.

“At the begin­ning of October, we started har­vest­ing fol­low­ing our pro­ce­dures to ensure the best qual­ity,” he added. ​“Still, the result­ing extra vir­gin olive oil was poor in aro­mas and scents, so I decided to stop har­vest­ing.”

Romiti said olive vol­umes were neg­a­tively impacted by rain in May, which delayed flow­er­ing.

“After that, the drought set in, and finally, with the August rain, the olive fruit fly appeared,” he said, adding that the farm is now heav­ily invest­ing in organic pro­duc­tion and improved prun­ing oper­a­tions.

Meanwhile, pro­duc­ers in neigh­bor­ing Lazio also reported uneven results.

“The har­vest did not go well in terms of vol­umes. We have seen a 60 to 70 per­cent drop,” Antonio Gioacchini, owner of Olio Solum, told Olive Oil Times. ​“Quality, on the other hand, is top-notch.”

According to Gioacchini, rain­fall heav­ily hit the ​“beau­ti­ful” flow­er­ing at the begin­ning of the sea­son, which com­pro­mised the yields between May and June.

Conversely, Pietro Re, the founder and chief exec­u­tive of nearby Olio Tamia, reported a 30 per­cent vol­ume increase com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year.

“That is a very pos­i­tive trend, con­sid­er­ing the chal­lenges we face in our region, where a sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tion in pro­duc­tion has been reported,” he told Olive Oil Times. ​“While our [pro­cess­ing] yields are down 1.5 per­cent com­pared to last year’s, qual­ity stays very high.”

As the largest vol­umes of Italian olive oil – by a wide mar­gin – are pro­duced in the south of the coun­try, the results from these regions sig­nif­i­cantly affect over­all national fig­ures.

Still, even in south­ern regions, pro­duc­ers had to cope with some extreme weather events.

Giovanni Petrazzuoli, a pro­ducer located in the hills of Caiazzo, Campania, told Olive Oil Times that excess rain­fall dur­ing flow­er­ing impacted pol­li­na­tion.

“Production vol­umes this sea­son dropped 30 per­cent because of the con­tin­u­ous rain in that period,” he said. ​“We are increas­ingly notic­ing cli­mate change impacts.”

“We are going to have other sea­sons like the last one, or even worse, so we have to be resilient and man­age our olive orchards in inno­v­a­tive ways,” Petrazzuoli added.

Meanwhile, Barbara Bibbò, owner of nearby Masseria dei Nunzi, empha­sized how inclement weather might impact qual­ity.

“We were a few weeks away from the har­vest with an excel­lent quan­tity of olives on the trees,” she told Olive Oil Times. ​“A strong hail­storm in September seri­ously com­pro­mised our cul­ti­va­tion of the mono­va­ri­etal Ortice-San Giorgio, native to our region. Therefore, we decided not to pro­duce the mono­va­ri­etal this year.”

“However, we have obtained an excel­lent blend, our Terra Oleum, with the other vari­eties on the com­pa­ny’s lands,” she added.

In Sicily, a few regions on the island are report­ing a lower-than-expected har­vest.

“First indi­ca­tions tell us that the over­all Sicilian olive oil pro­duc­tion will be five to 20 per­cent lower,” Salvatore Bono, co-owner of Bonolio, told Olive Oil Times. ​“Our vol­umes will be on par with last year as we antic­i­pated such a down­ward turn and pro­ceeded to some strate­gic acqui­si­tions to improve our olive oil sources.”

Local farm­ers warned of lower vol­umes in Agrigento, Sicily while report­ing high-qual­ity yields.

“The olive har­vest was more labo­ri­ous and chal­leng­ing than usual,” Silvia Di Vincenzo, co-owner of Mandranova, told Olive Oil Times. ​“A very hot year, it has been cru­cial to irri­gate. The fruit ripen­ing was slower and uneven across vari­eties. Still, we made it.”

“The prod­uct qual­ity is good, which is due to the fact that we fol­lowed our grove every day, allow­ing us to achieve a high level of qual­ity,” she added. ​“Volumes are below aver­age.”

Puglia is usu­ally respon­si­ble for 50 to 60 per­cent of national pro­duc­tion on the main­land, mak­ing it Italy’s largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing region. Apulian pro­duc­ers mainly reported hav­ing a good har­vest.

“It was a crazy har­vest,” Lucia Di Molfetta, co-owner of Di Molfetta Pantaleo in Bisceglie, one of the most pro­duc­tive areas in Puglia, told Olive Oil Times. ​“We recently fin­ished pro­duc­tion last week, but the pur­chase price of olives this year was sig­nif­i­cant.”

She added that despite the mill’s pol­icy of only pur­chas­ing fruit in the best con­di­tions to pro­duce its extra vir­gin olive oil, there was no short­age of oppor­tu­nity this year. ​“We had rel­e­vant pro­duc­tion vol­umes and excel­lent qual­ity,” Di Molfetta said.

However, she warned that high olive oil prices had low­ered the mar­gin between high and low-qual­ity pro­duc­ers, incen­tiviz­ing some to save on pro­duc­tion costs while tak­ing advan­tage of high prices for vir­gin and lam­pante olive oil.

“Unluckily, nowa­days, the dif­fer­ence between us, who work on qual­ity, and those who do not, holds the same value in the mar­ket because prices have become so high that we can hardly afford to increase our prices fur­ther com­pared to large retail chains,” Di Molfetta con­cluded.