Pests Plague Wild Olives on Croatian Island as Producers Remain Steadfast

The oil from this year’s har­vest of wild olives on Croatia’s Lun penin­sula will not be sen­sa­tional.

“There was no real har­vest at all, and the lit­tle fruit that was har­vested is not of the high­est qual­ity,” said Želimir Badurina, a suc­cess­ful olive grower and owner of a local oil mill on the island of Pag, with notice­able sad­ness in his voice.

In the spring, Badurina enthu­si­as­ti­cally accepted an invi­ta­tion to pro­duce oil from the wild olives at the north­ern tip of Pag and send them together with oils from Dalmatia to the 2022 edi­tion of the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition.

Pag, located about five kilo­me­ters off the coast of cen­tral Croatia, is famous for its sheep cheese and is home to some of Europe’s old­est olive trees.

Badurina and other local pro­duc­ers believe the oil from the wild trees is not ade­quately val­ued out­side of Croatia and are work­ing together to change this.

Badurina is one of the founders of the Lun Olive Cooperative, which, with the sup­port of the city of Novalja and the local tourist board, man­ages the Lun Olive Gardens as a tourist des­ti­na­tion.

Lun olive groves cover about 400 hectares and com­prise more than 80,000 trees of the indige­nous Oblica vari­ety, grafted on the wild sub­strate of the Olea oleaster line. Badurina claims that the old­est olive tree on Lun is 2,000 years old.

Ivica Vlatković, pres­i­dent of the Zadar County Olive Growers Association, said the grove is a rar­ity not only on Pag and Croatia but in all of Europe. There are not many wild olives in their nat­ural envi­ron­ment that remain intact in the Mediterranean.

Both men hope to pro­mote this lit­tle-known fact to help turn Pag into a tourist des­ti­na­tion renowned for its unique extra vir­gin olive oils.

Vlatković believes the first step in doing so is to send local extra vir­gin olive oils to the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition, which will pro­vide them with a large and diverse audi­ence.

“If the olives are prop­erly har­vested and processed, and the qual­ity of the oil is pre­served, that oil could become a sen­sa­tion of the NYIOOC, and thus the demon­strate the value of the Lun penin­sula as an olive-grow­ing cul­tural asset,” he said.

According to Tatjana Klepo, a researcher at the Croatian Agency for Agriculture and Food, the Oblica olives from Lun have a diverse and com­plex geneal­ogy: They rep­re­sent one of the two wild olive genomes iden­ti­fied in Croatia.

The fruit from this sub-cul­ti­var, called Luna-Lastovo, are small. Between 15 and 20 kilo­grams of the fruits are required to pro­duce one kilo­gram of oil. Vlatković believes that the result­ing oils have a unique sen­sory pro­file and plenty of healthy prop­er­ties as a result of the ter­roir.

He and Badurina planned to send three dif­fer­ent oils from the Lun penin­sula to the NYIOOC: one made from the fruits of wild olives, the sec­ond pro­duced from a Corsican vari­ety grafted on a wild sub­strate and the third from the local olives, also grafted on a wild sub­strate.

However, the 2021 har­vest has not unfolded on Pag with­out its chal­lenges. The sea­son was going well at first, but local grow­ers quickly encoun­tered prob­lems in the flow­er­ing and fer­til­iza­tion phase.

“The strong heat prac­ti­cally burned the flower and fer­til­iza­tion went wrong, so some of the fruits that sur­vived the heat­stroke began to get sick,” Badurina said. ​“These were ​‘leafy’ fruits that turned black and fell over time.”

“As one prob­lem does not come alone, the old Lun olive groves were also vis­ited by pests – olive fruit flies and olive bor­ers,” he added. ​“There is no fruit that is healthy and with which we can make one strong and top-qual­ity oil.”

The prob­lems with bor­ers and flies began imme­di­ately after fer­til­iza­tion when the fruits were the size of wheat grains. Fruits dam­aged by the olive borer, which nor­mally feeds on the olive pits, turned black and fell over time. The fruit that sur­vived has been vis­i­bly deformed.

After the olive bor­ers, a ter­ri­ble fly attack fol­lowed. By August, one trap was catch­ing 100 flies per day. Badurina said the mil­lenary olive grove in Lun was con­t­a­m­i­nated with pests.

He added that in Croatia, con­ven­tional meth­ods of pest con­trol have failed. The only time the trees are spared from the attacks is when the proper cli­matic con­di­tions occur – high tem­per­a­tures with low humid­ity – which he said have not hap­pened in the past three years.

Local grow­ers argue that ster­il­ized male flies should be pro­duced in lab­o­ra­to­ries and released through­out the olive groves. As a result, the eggs laid by female flies would not develop the lar­vae that destroy the fruit.

Apart from ster­il­ized males, pro­tec­tion against olive moths is pos­si­ble only with drones due to the inac­ces­si­bil­ity of the ter­rain. Badurina believes that the use of drones could effec­tively mon­i­tor the entire Lun penin­sula.

“But one drone costs about €30,000,” he said. ​“We have the will, we have the knowl­edge, but we do not have the mate­r­ial means.”

Badurina and other olive farm­ers hope to receive assis­tance from the gov­ern­ment to buy the drones and pro­tect the olives. Despite the chal­lenges, he still hopes to send oils to com­pete.

“We are not giv­ing up on New York,” he said. ​“Everything is only being extended for next year.”