Pandemic, Drought Slow Chilean Harvest

Chile’s increas­ingly wors­en­ing Covid-19 out­break has brought much of the coun­try to a stand­still in the past few weeks and left olive oil pro­duc­ers rush­ing to com­plete the 2020 har­vest.

According to the country’s health min­istry, there are more than 122,000 cases of the novel coro­n­avirus in Chile with nearly 1,500 deaths. The vast major­ity of cases are in the country’s cap­i­tal, Santiago, but all 16 regions of Chile have been hit by the pan­demic.

While none of the country’s major olive oil pro­duc­ers have had to shut down due to local Covid-19 out­breaks, pro­duc­ers say that imple­ment­ing safety mea­sures to mit­i­gate the spread of the dis­ease have delayed the rate at which they can har­vest.

The per­sis­tent drought fac­ing much of the coun­try and low global olive oil prices have also com­pounded the chal­lenges cur­rently fac­ing pro­duc­ers.

In spite of these set­backs, Chilean pro­duc­ers expect to har­vest a lit­tle less than 20,000 tons of olive oil in 2020, very sim­i­lar to 2019, in which the coun­try pro­duced 19,000 tons.

“From what we have pro­jected and con­firmed over the past few days, we will have a smaller quan­tity but bet­ter qual­ity than last year,” José Manuel Reyes, the devel­op­ment man­ager at Agricola Pobeña, which pro­duces the Alonso olive oil brand, told Olive Oil Times.

Based in the cen­tral O’Higgins region of Chile, about 70 miles south­west of Santiago, Agricola Pobeña pro­duces a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent types of extra vir­gin olive oil from 1,500 acres of olive groves.

While O’Higgins is home to just 0.83 per­cent of all the country’s Covid-19 cases, this has not stopped Agricola Pobeña from tak­ing all the nec­es­sary safety pre­cau­tions.

“It has been a dif­fer­ent har­vest with the Covid-19 fac­tor where we have had to mul­ti­ply the secu­rity mea­sures, tak­ing all pre­cau­tions to keep our team pro­tected and away from all kinds of infec­tions,” Manuel Reyes said. ​“We all know that the pres­ence of a case within the team can be very com­pli­cated”

On top of con­tend­ing with the novel coro­n­avirus, the O’Higgins region remains in the midst of a drought, which made the har­vest a stress­ful one for the pro­duc­ers at Agricola Pobeña, but not impos­si­ble.

“Despite every­thing that affects us today, we have man­aged to har­vest with­out prob­lems, with good yields and kilo­grams of fruit despite the dif­fi­cult year we had due to the drought and high tem­per­a­tures,” Manuel Reyes said.

He is more wor­ried about what the pan­demic will do to global mar­kets, espe­cially how it will impact long-term con­sump­tion and sales of olive oil.

“Different mar­kets have all con­tracted due to the cur­rent pan­demic, but we hope to con­tinue export­ing Chilean oils, as we have been doing and posi­tion­ing them among the best in the world,” Manuel Reyes said.

Not too far to the south­east of Agricola Pobeña’s groves sit those of Agroindustrial Siracusa, the pro­ducer of the Aura olive oil brand.

Based in the val­ley of Cúrico, which boasts a cli­mate very sim­i­lar to the Mediterranean, Felipe Valle, the company’s export man­ager, said the pan­demic had cre­ated a unique set of chal­lenges for the com­pany, such as har­vest­ing effi­ciently and effec­tively while main­tain­ing gov­ern­ment-man­dated social dis­tanc­ing and hygiene stan­dards.

“One of the great chal­lenges is effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion regard­ing the mea­sures that must be used for the dif­fer­ent tasks, in order to guar­an­tee their ful­fill­ment and to be able to keep the com­pany run­ning,” he told Olive Oil Times.

In spite of the chal­lenges pre­sented by the pan­demic, Valle said that he expected a nor­mal har­vest this year in the Cúrico val­ley.

Cúrico sits in the region of Maule, which has seen nearly dou­ble the num­ber of infec­tions as neigh­bor­ing O’Higgins, with slightly more than 1,800 cases and 24 deaths (two more than have been recorded in O’Higgins).

“We expect to have nor­mal pro­duc­tion, but with very good qual­ity oils, due to the good cli­mate that has made it pos­si­ble for us to coor­di­nate the har­vest based on the ideal stages of matu­rity,” Valle said. ​“This allowed us to achieve intense oils, with good aro­mas and very good green fruiti­ness.”

However, he acknowl­edged that not all of the country’s pro­duc­ers shared Agroindustrial Siracusa’s good luck. Valle expects the drought to impact both the quan­tity and qual­ity of other pro­duc­ers’ olive oils.

“With respect to the rest of the com­pa­nies, a nor­mal year is also expected, with­out los­ing sight of the fact that there are some that will see pro­duc­tion decrease due to the drought that has per­sisted for some years,” he said.

“They are more affected by the yield, in terms of kilo­grams of oil per hectare, and with­out a doubt qual­ity will also be com­pro­mised. A grove man­aged under exces­sive water stress gives rise to more unbal­anced oils,” Valle added.

Back in the O’Higgins region, just a few miles east of Agricola Pobeña olive trees, the super high den­sity olive groves of Olivos del Sur sprawl over the rolling hills of Chile’s Central Valley.

Since the com­pany sits in a fairly secluded part of the val­ley, far from any major cities or high­ways, there have not been any prob­lems with Covid-19 infec­tions.

However, Claudio Lovazzano, the company’s head of mar­ket­ing, said that had not stopped Olivos del Sur from tak­ing pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sures. Even with no one get­ting sick, the pan­demic has caused logis­ti­cal delays for the com­pany.

“Resources take more time to arrive: from machine parts to pack­ag­ing mate­ri­als, since we are deal­ing with par­tial and full lock­downs in sev­eral places within Chile,” he told Olive Oil Times.

In spite of chal­lenges stem­ming from the pan­demic and drought, Olivos del Sur expects a slightly bet­ter har­vest than usual. In 2019, the com­pany pro­duced six mil­lion liters of extra vir­gin olive oil.

Lovazzano attrib­uted this increase to invest­ments the com­pany has been mak­ing, includ­ing the incor­po­ra­tion of new tech­nol­ogy into the groves, which will help with resource man­age­ment and tim­ing the har­vest.

“We are now imple­ment­ing our pre­ci­sion farm­ing project which, among other things, allows us to col­lect pre­cise data for every sin­gle tree in the row, allow­ing us to see it as an iso­lated pro­duc­tion unit,” he said. ​“Through high-res­o­lu­tion images, we ana­lyze cli­mate, soil and other rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion.”

“Global mar­kets are strug­gling and Covid-19 has made every­thing much more dif­fi­cult,” Lovazzano added. ​“But times are chang­ing very quickly and we need to adapt.”