Olive Oil Production in Portugal Set to Rebound

As the olive har­vest gets under­way in Portugal, farm­ers and offi­cials antic­i­pate a slight pro­duc­tion rebound com­pared to last year but not a repeat of the record-high yield of the 2021/22 crop year.

Separate esti­mates from the European Union and Federation of the E.U. Olive Oil Industry (Fedolive) antic­i­pate the har­vest could reach 150,000 tons in 2023/24, about 20 per­cent higher than last year and nearly 12 per­cent above the five-year aver­age.

Officials from the Alentejo Olive Oil Sustainability Program, a group of 20 pro­duc­ers from Portugal’s largest olive-grow­ing region, esti­mated that national pro­duc­tion would be closer to 140,000 to 145,000 tons.

Farmers attrib­uted the pro­duc­tion rebound to many of the coun­try’s groves enter­ing an ​‘on-year’ in the nat­ural alter­nate bear­ing cycle of the olive tree.

Additionally, north­ern Portugal expe­ri­enced a rainy win­ter, alle­vi­at­ing some of the worst symp­toms of last year’s his­toric drought. This was fol­lowed by a hot and dry sum­mer, lim­it­ing the emer­gence of pests, includ­ing the olive fruit fly.

“The irri­gated olive groves are pro­gress­ing well and have good prospects for the 2023 cam­paign,” Gonçalo Moreira, man­ager of the Alentejo Olive Oil Sustainability Program, told Olive Oil Times.

“The pro­duc­tion capac­ity was con­di­tioned by suc­ces­sive frosts at the end of win­ter and begin­ning of spring and then by high heat dur­ing the flow­er­ing period, which led to prob­lems with flow­er­ing and con­se­quently with olive pro­duc­tion,” he added. ​“This is com­bined with the impact of drought on dry olive groves and hail­storms at the end of sum­mer in the north­ern region of Portugal.”

The com­bi­na­tion of much-needed rain and extreme weather events has resulted in a mixed har­vest for pro­duc­ers in the north­ern Trás-os-Montes region, which is dom­i­nated by tra­di­tional olive groves.

“This har­vest is going to be a mixed one in terms of yields, in our grove as in the rest of the coun­try,” Julio Alves, founder of Trás-os-Montes-based Quinta dos Olmais, told Olive Oil Times. ​“We have plots with a very rea­son­able amount of olives and other sec­tors where the trees have almost no olives.”

“I am not a fan of pre­dic­tions because just one bad day can ruin an entire year of hard work,” he added. ​“So far, this year’s har­vest is look­ing much bet­ter than last year, but frankly, this is not that hard, as last year was the worst year ever recorded at our farm.”

Alves said that his groves, oth­ers in Trás-os-Montes and other parts of north­ern Portugal ben­e­fited from the wet win­ter. The ample rain­fall brought some relief after the ​“hell­ish sum­mer” of 2022, which low­ered expec­ta­tions for the cur­rent har­vest as scorch­ing tem­per­a­tures dam­aged new shoots on the trees.

However, based on his obser­va­tions, he was skep­ti­cal that Portuguese pro­duc­tion would reach 150,000 tons.

On the oppo­site side of Portugal, in the south­ern Algarve region, Pedro Esperança, the chief of oper­a­tions at Viveiros Monterosa, told Olive Oil Times that the com­pany was enter­ing the final week of the har­vest after begin­ning ten days ahead of sched­ule.

“In quan­tity, we have a sig­nif­i­cant increase com­pared to last year, which was expected with an ​‘on-year,’ ” he said. ​“Quality is very high, we have a cool­ing sys­tem that allows us to do the extrac­tion process under low tem­per­a­tures, pests and dis­ease lev­els were very low, and the tim­ing of har­vest was close to per­fec­tion.”

However, Esperança said the lack of rain dur­ing the spring meant pro­duc­tion could not rebound fully. Furthermore, unprece­dent­edly high autumn tem­per­a­tures at the start of the har­vest posed a sig­nif­i­cant logis­ti­cal chal­lenge.

“You could see with your eyes fruit col­laps­ing when exposed to direct sun,” he said. As a result, the com­pany worked tire­lessly to move the olives straight to the air-con­di­tioned mill as soon as they were har­vested.

However, Esperança said high tem­per­a­tures sig­nif­i­cantly low­ered the emer­gence of pests and dis­eases. ​“Climate change actu­ally helps on this sub­ject with irri­gated olive trees and a cooled extrac­tion sys­tem,” he added.

Esperança agreed that Portugal could pro­duce 150,000 tons of olive oil this year and antic­i­pated pro­duc­tion to increase as more grow­ers irri­gate their groves and new pro­duc­ers plant high-den­sity and super-high-den­sity plan­ta­tions.

Still, he said the coun­try’s increas­ingly hot and dry cli­mate would require the gov­ern­ment to find new solu­tions to drought.

“It’s dra­matic; gov­ern­ments need to find a way to store water when it rains and dis­trib­ute it to the farm­ers,” Esperança said. ​“Farmers need to have the view and capac­ity to con­vert or install irri­gated olive orchards so we will not expe­ri­ence what south­ern Spain is.”

Directly north of the Algarve is Alentejo. According to Moreira from the Alentejo Olive Oil Sustainability Program, Alentejo was respon­si­ble for 92 per­cent of Portuguese olive oil pro­duc­tion in the pre­vi­ous crop year.

“In 2023 the drought sit­u­a­tion in south­ern Portugal has not improved, which is a prob­lem for the unir­ri­gated olive grove,” he said. ​“In the regions north of Alentejo, the rain was reg­u­lar and with nor­mal val­ues for the sea­sons, which guar­an­teed water for the reg­u­lar cycle of the olive trees.”

“In Alentejo, olive oil pro­duc­tion is mainly car­ried out in irri­gated olive groves, which allows olive trees to have access to water at cru­cial moments for their devel­op­ment,” Moreira added. ​“Irrigated olive groves are more resis­tant to drought, and Alqueva guar­an­tees inter­an­nual reg­u­lar­ity, which is why it would be impor­tant to develop other projects like Alqueva in Portugal to mit­i­gate the impact of cli­mate change.”

Manuel Norte Santo, the export man­ager of Establecimiento Manuel Silva Torrado, also located in Alentejo, told Olive Oil Times that he is expect­ing a medium har­vest, which will exceed last year’s total but fall short of the coun­try’s record-break­ing yield two years ago.

“We already started the har­vest here,” he said. ​“The rain took some stress off the tree, and it seems that it delayed the har­vest a lit­tle, but soon after the rains in September, high tem­per­a­tures appeared in October, which accel­er­ated the process again. These tem­per­a­tures also caused the appear­ance of flies, which accel­er­ated the pick­ing of some pro­duc­ers.”

While Norte Santo said that rain­fall had been scarce in south­ern Portugal over the win­ter and spring, he said enough had fallen to replen­ish reser­voirs and other water reserves, which allowed the com­pany to irri­gate the groves at cru­cial moments in olive devel­op­ment.

Norte Santo believes that pro­duc­tion in Portugal this year could reach the esti­mated 150,000 tons but agreed with Esperança that olive oil yields would con­tinue to trend upward.

“Every day, we see the appear­ance of more olive groves in our coun­try, mainly in the Alentejo and a huge con­ver­sion of tra­di­tional olive groves to inten­sive and super-inten­sive plan­ta­tions,” he said. ​“Portugal is devel­op­ing and opti­miz­ing its agri­cul­tural tech­niques and meth­ods, achiev­ing excel­lent pro­duc­tion results in its olive groves.”

Moreira went one step fur­ther and argued that Portugal could soon rou­tinely exceed its record-high har­vest in 2021/22 as more super-high-den­sity groves are planted.

“In the future, we will be able to sur­pass the record reached in the 2021 har­vest due to the increase in the area of mod­ern olive groves in hedgerows and because we have many new olive groves that are only now com­ing into pro­duc­tion, allow­ing us to increase the amount of olive oil pro­duced in Portugal,” he said.

“Alongside this pro­duc­tive growth, we have a major tech­no­log­i­cal mod­ern­iza­tion not only in olive groves, with increases in pro­duc­tiv­ity, but mainly in mills with an increase in olive oil extrac­tion capac­ity and its qual­ity,” Moreira added.

In Northern Alentejo, Ana Cardoso and Paolo Morosi of Monte do Camelo agreed that this year’s har­vest would be bet­ter than last year’s. Still, the drought had pre­vented their groves from reach­ing their full poten­tial.

“Compared to the 2022 cam­paign, we expect a suf­fi­cient, though not opti­mal, yield this year,” they told Olive Oil Times. ​“There is uneven pro­duc­tion on our grove, which means this will not be a year of excep­tional har­vest.”

“The rea­son for that might be, once again, related to the cli­mate episodes of heavy frost in late win­ter, drought, extreme heat and wind that we have been expe­ri­enc­ing,” Cardoso and Morosi added.

While the coun­try’s tran­si­tion to mod­ern olive groves will increase annual pro­duc­tion, tra­di­tional pro­duc­ers such as Cardoso and Morosi are con­cerned about how the change will impact the envi­ron­ment and the eco­nom­ics of tra­di­tional groves.

“Small-medium scale pro­duc­ers, in addi­tion to hav­ing to cope with drought and other chal­lenges, find them­selves forced to con­tend with the ever-increas­ing num­ber of super-inten­sive groves, both envi­ron­men­tally and eco­nom­i­cally,” they said.

Back in Trás-os-Montes, Alves said one of his most sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges is find­ing enough work­ers to har­vest his tra­di­tion­ally planted groves.

“Our major prob­lem con­tin­ues to be the lack of man­power; it has become sys­temic to farm­ing and, in our region, gets worse every year,” he said. ​“I can’t fore­see a solu­tion in the near future as most of our work is sea­sonal and does not attract peo­ple to a region that each year sees more cuts in gov­ern­ment spend­ing on edu­ca­tion and health­care.”

In the groves of Viveiros Monterosa, Esperança also cited labor as one of his com­pa­ny’s most sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges. Along with find­ing enough work­ers, he said the turnover meant that work­ers have to be trained each year, and there is no accu­mu­la­tion of knowl­edge.

“On sell­ing, the biggest chal­lenge is global uncer­tainty, which leads to mar­ket uncer­tainty,” Esperança said. ​“Clients are not buy­ing or pay­ing less; they sim­ply are divid­ing usual orders to reduce the risk of not sell­ing exist­ing stock.”

Meanwhile, Norte Santo said the impacts of infla­tion have con­tin­ued to drive up pro­duc­tion costs.

“The sit­u­a­tion of pro­duc­tion costs con­tin­ues to be very con­cern­ing; prices through the year con­tin­ued to rise, and there is no sign of a decrease,” he said.

“The pro­duc­ers have to make a great finan­cial effort to ensure that noth­ing is miss­ing from their pro­duc­tion regimes, but some­times this is not pos­si­ble, and they must dis­pense with some of the treat­ments or pro­ce­dures, which hurts the pro­duc­tion of their olive grove,” Norte Santo con­cluded.