Jaén Launches Initiative to Increase Sustainability of Farms, Mills

The local gov­ern­ment of Jaén, one of the largest olive oil pro­duc­ing provinces in Spain, is offer­ing a series of new ser­vices to coop­er­a­tives and mills in an effort to help increase their prof­itabil­ity and reduce costs.

Producers through­out the province, as well as in the rest of the coun­try, have been suf­fer­ing from per­sis­tently low olive oil prices for more than a year now, with many say­ing they are mak­ing a loss on their oils.

“The olive sec­tor as a whole is fac­ing dif­fer­ent chal­lenges and per­haps the most dif­fi­cult is the com­pet­i­tive­ness of our mills and coop­er­a­tives,” said Pedro Bruno, Jaén’s deputy of agri­cul­ture, live­stock, envi­ron­ment and cli­mate change.

“Therefore, one of the strate­gies to achieve it may be sus­tain­abil­ity, tak­ing advan­tage of the by-prod­ucts of the olive grove so that income or cost sav­ings can be obtained that con­tribute to this decline in the prof­itabil­ity of the indus­try,” he added. ​“In short, to make our olive oil indus­try more sus­tain­able from an eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal point of view.”

Through the ini­tia­tive, which is being called Seralma Verde or green soul, Jaén’s local gov­ern­ment will pro­vide tech­ni­cal advice on projects and help mills and coop­er­a­tives find part­ners to develop these projects.

The gov­ern­ment plans to focus on four main areas: trans­form­ing olive tree prun­ings into wood pel­lets; clean­ing and recy­cling olive stones, so they may be trans­formed into bio­mass; trans­form­ing olive pomace into envi­ron­men­tally-friendly fer­til­izer; and pro­duc­ing bio­gas from olive waste water and fatty pomace.

The ben­e­fit of these projects is three-fold: the mills and coop­er­a­tives are get­ting rid of waste they nor­mally have to pay to have removed, cre­at­ing by-prod­ucts that can be used by mills and coop­er­a­tives or sold to other busi­nesses, and becom­ing more sus­tain­able.

“We hope to diver­sify the pro­duc­tive activ­ity of the oil mills and coop­er­a­tives by cre­at­ing new ser­vices linked to the olive grove, cre­at­ing new jobs and extend­ing those that are already gen­er­ated due to the har­vest­ing cam­paign,” Bruno said.

“We intend to attract and mobi­lize new invest­ments, reduce CO2 emis­sion lev­els through the use of renew­able ener­gies and demon­strate that we are a province that believes in sus­tain­abil­ity and is com­mit­ted to it,” he added.

• Diputación de Jaén