Olive Oil Producers in Portugal Celebrate Country’s Second-Highest Yield

As the har­vest con­cludes in Portugal, olive oil pro­duc­tion is esti­mated to reach 150,000 to 160,000 tons in the 2023/24 crop year, con­firm­ing a slight increase from the pre­vi­ous har­vest.

Overall, Portuguese pro­duc­ers said it was a good har­vest. However, high mois­ture lev­els con­cen­trated in the olives due to win­ter rain made oil extrac­tion dif­fi­cult and reduced the final quan­tity of olive oil.

Jeremias Lancastre e Tavora, the gen­eral man­ager of Olivo Gestão, an Alentejo-based com­pany, con­firmed the dif­fi­cul­ties faced by pro­duc­ers dur­ing the har­vest, which started in October and fin­ished recently.

He said, ​“It was a demand­ing cam­paign, in tech­ni­cal terms, for the olive oil indus­try in Portugal, par­tic­u­larly in Alentejo,” the country’s largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing region by a sig­nif­i­cant mar­gin.

“Initial fore­casts pointed to an aver­age sea­son, even if we had some uncer­tain­ties regard­ing the quan­tity of expected olives due to the unsea­son­ably cold weather in the spring,” Lancastre e Tavora added.

He said that in October, the fruit appeared to be ripen­ing well, indi­cat­ing good lev­els of oil accu­mu­la­tion.

“However, after the first rains in October and while it was still hot, the olives stopped accu­mu­lat­ing oil, and the humid­ity lev­els increased expo­nen­tially,” Lancastre e Tavora said. ​“This made the entire extrac­tion process very dif­fi­cult and caused very low oil yields, even reach­ing 2.5 per­cent below the aver­age for this region.”

“Another chal­lenge we had was Gafa, a fun­gus that appeared on our olives towards the end of November,” he added. ​“We had to be highly selec­tive when pick­ing olives to take to the mill to avoid mix­ing the oils and acid­ity.”

Also known as anthrac­nose, Gafa is an olive tree dis­ease that affects the qual­ity of the oil, reflected mainly in increased acid­ity. Humidity and high tem­per­a­tures are usu­ally to blame.

On the other side of Portugal, where tra­di­tional olive groves dom­i­nate the country’s rugged, hilly land­scape, pro­duc­ers reported a pro­duc­tion rebound with sim­i­lar chal­lenges.

Julio Alves, the founder of Quinta dos Olmais, said pro­duc­tion in Trás-os-Montes was expected to increase after last year’s poor har­vest. However, pro­duc­ers also expe­ri­enced lower oil accu­mu­la­tion lev­els after a wet autumn and win­ter.

“Following the dis­as­trous cam­paign of 2022, we reverted to our usual num­bers,” he said. ​“Opting for an early har­vest, we pro­ceeded despite the rainy weather con­di­tions.”

“Consequently, we man­aged to gather a higher quan­tity of olives, albeit with slightly lower yields due to their increased water con­tent,” Alves added. ​“Overall, the har­vest in our region pro­gressed smoothly, with no sig­nif­i­cant set­backs.”

Along with lower oil yields, Alves said the most sig­nif­i­cant obsta­cle pro­duc­ers in the north of the coun­try faced was mud and slip­pery ter­rain caused by the rain, which meant the har­vest unfolded more slowly.

While this sea­son was below the record-high of 206,000 tons pro­duced in the 2021/22 crop year, Lancastre e Tavora said pro­duc­tion will con­tinue to increase as the num­ber of newly planted super-high-den­sity olive groves in Alentejo increases.

“Since 2005, the mod­ern­iza­tion of agribusi­ness in Portugal, the effi­ciency of pro­cess­ing at olive groves, and the qual­ity of the olive oil pro­duced here have been encour­ag­ing for local farm­ers,” he said. ​“The fact that it is an indige­nous crop with water avail­abil­ity, good soil and rea­son­able cli­matic con­di­tions has made it pos­si­ble to achieve results.”

Like many of his peers, Lancastre e Tavora pre­dicts that Portugal will be one of the world’s largest olive oil-pro­duc­ing coun­tries in the next five years.

“At the same time, due to the high effi­ciency and qual­ity of mod­ern olive groves, Portugal will likely become a ref­er­ence point for the sec­tor,” he said. ​“This will also bring very pos­i­tive results to smaller projects in regions where it is not pos­si­ble to irri­gate tra­di­tional olive groves, but which will ben­e­fit from scale and con­di­tions for pro­duc­ing qual­ity olive oil.”

The com­ple­tion of the Alqueva dam in 2002 has made Alentejo far more resilient to peri­ods of drought. As a result, pro­duc­tion in Portugal fell far less sharply in the 2022/23 crop year than in many other parts of the Mediterranean basin.

“The fact that we have water avail­able and are not so depen­dent on rain each year means that we are not as vul­ner­a­ble to cli­mate cycles,” Lancastre e Tavora said. ​“It is there­fore eas­ier to adapt oper­a­tions to the new cli­mate real­ity, to pro­tect olive trees and olives as much as pos­si­ble, and allow us to be pro­duc­tive and main­tain qual­ity.”

While the Alqueva dam pro­tects against drought, Lancastre e Tavora wor­ries that unsea­son­ably high and low tem­per­a­tures, a phe­nom­e­non observed to become increas­ingly com­mon in recent years, will pro­vide new chal­lenges for olive grow­ers.

“Changes to the Mediterranean cli­mate nor­mally char­ac­ter­ized by the four sea­sons can alter the plant cycle and bring insta­bil­ity to the pro­duc­tion process,” he said. ​“This will affect farm­ers glob­ally because [about 70 per­cent] of pro­duc­tion is still from rain­fed and tra­di­tional olive groves.”

“Climate change wor­ries us,” Lancastre e Tavora added. ​“Therefore, we do every­thing we can to incor­po­rate sus­tain­abil­ity mea­sures, both at an agro­nomic and agro-indus­trial level.”

Along with the rest of the olive oil world, Portugal has expe­ri­enced a sharp increase in olive oil prices over the past two years. Alves cited this as a con­cern for tra­di­tional pro­duc­ers as high prices have seen con­sumers change their habits in Spain and Italy.

According to data from the International Olive Council, extra vir­gin olive oil prices in Trás-os-Montes reached €859.5 per 100 kilo­grams in February, slightly below January’s record high and 50 per­cent above February 2023.

“In my opin­ion, this price rise depends on two main fac­tors: cycli­cal and struc­tural,” Lancastre e Tavora said. ​“On the one hand, the lack of rain and unfa­vor­able weather at crit­i­cal moments for the crop caused two con­sec­u­tive years of low pro­duc­tion, which led to a lack of olive oil avail­abil­ity in the mar­ket. At the same time, there was enor­mous con­sumer loy­alty to the prod­uct. It was nec­es­sary to raise the price level.”

“On the other hand, more struc­turally, infla­tion rates for all food items in gen­eral also play a part in the rise of olive oil prices,” he added. ​“Indeed, pro­duc­tion costs have risen con­sid­er­ably, but it is also true that over the last two years, infla­tion on food prod­ucts has reached an all-time high and has increased house­hold costs.”

Despite the chal­lenges of increased pro­duc­tion costs and cli­mate change, Lancastre e Tavora is opti­mistic about the future of the Portuguese and global olive oil sec­tors.

“If we con­sider aver­age annual pro­duc­tion, olive oil con­tin­ues to rep­re­sent less than [three] per­cent of the oils con­sumed in the world, which demon­strates the growth capac­ity of this prod­uct, being the only one with all the well-known health ben­e­fits,” he said.

“Now more than ever, pro­duc­ing coun­tries must define a strat­egy to pro­mote the prod­uct in more parts of the world, par­tic­u­larly in emerg­ing mar­kets, where more house­holds have become more health con­scious and can afford olive oil,” he con­cluded.

Daniel Dawson con­tributed to this report.