Signs Suggest a Weak Harvest in Turkey

After last year’s record-high yield of 421,000 tons, olive grow­ers and oil pro­duc­ers in Turkey expect a lower har­vest in the 2023/24 crop year.

Producers across the country’s most fruit­ful olive oil-pro­duc­ing regions said cold and rainy weather in the spring had dam­aged olive trees as they were blos­som­ing, leav­ing many bar­ren.

Furthermore, the dev­as­tat­ing earth­quakes that shook east­ern Turkey in February dam­aged olive trees and mills in the region.

After enjoy­ing a bumper har­vest in the 2022/23 crop year, Yusuf Ozpinar, the man­ag­ing part­ner of Zetmar Food and International Trading Company, said he expected to pro­duce 60 per­cent less olive oil in 2023/24 from his groves in south­west­ern Turkey.

“There was a sig­nif­i­cant change in the tim­ing of the spring sea­son,” he told Olive Oil Times. ​“We had a longer win­ter this year. During the blos­som­ing period, the air tem­per­a­ture was lower than usual, and we had a lot of rainy days, which affected the fruit set­ting neg­a­tively. We didn’t see it yet, but too much rain in the spring may cause fun­gal dis­eases too.”

From her van­tage point in Mut, a dis­trict located on Turkey’s south­ern coast, Esra Deniz, owner of Ezra Olive Oil, con­firmed that hail has dev­as­tated her har­vest as well.

“I lost half my olives because of hail,” she told Olive Oil Times. Deniz added that erratic weather, includ­ing tor­ren­tial rain­fall in June after long months of drought, and ris­ing pro­duc­tion costs were the main chal­lenges she expects to face ahead of the har­vest.

Taking a wider view of the sit­u­a­tion, Mustafa Tan, pres­i­dent of the National Olive and Olive Oil Council, said that pro­duc­tion would likely decrease but that it remained too early to pre­dict how much olive oil will be pro­duced in 2023/24. The coun­cil will pub­lish its offi­cial har­vest esti­mate in September.

In its own pre­lim­i­nary esti­mate in May, the United States Department of Agriculture pre­dicted that pro­duc­tion would decrease to 280,000 tons in the 2023/24 crop year. However, the orga­ni­za­tion added that their esti­mates would con­tinue to change as the sea­son unfolded.

In its esti­mate, the USDA attrib­uted the har­vest decrease to many pro­duc­ers in the coun­try enter­ing a ​‘off-year’ in the nat­ural alter­nate bear­ing cycle of the olive tree.

Tuba Yilmaz, the founder of Gaia Oliva, con­firmed that she expects her har­vest to decline this year due to many of her groves enter­ing an ​‘off-year.’

“Turkey is not a coun­try where olive pro­duc­tion is con­sis­tent in every given year,” Yilmaz told Olive Oil Times. ​“It is a geog­ra­phy where olive trees would yield plenty in one year and less in the fol­low­ing.”

“Since the pre­vi­ous year was the year of abun­dance, we expect to have a decrease in olive pro­duc­tion com­pared to last year,” she added.

Yilmaz said data that she has seen indi­cates olive oil pro­duc­tion may fall by as much as one-third, attribut­ing this to rain and hail that affected groves across west­ern and south­ern Turkey along with many groves enter­ing an ​‘off-year.’

Bahar Alan, the owner of NovaVera, told Olive Oil Times that data she has seen from the Turkish Statistical Insitute’s crop pro­duc­tion fore­cast report ​“indi­cate a wor­ri­some 25 per­cent decrease com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year.”

“This decline in yield is a cause for con­cern and empha­sizes the urgency of address­ing cli­mate change and its impli­ca­tions on agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tiv­ity,” Alan said.

“Farmers in Turkey’s olive groves have encoun­tered chal­lenges due to the unusu­ally high tem­per­a­tures and heavy rain­fall dur­ing the flow­er­ing time,” she added. ​“Especially our groves in the Manisa region [in west­ern Turkey] were affected by heavy rains and hails. Both con­di­tions have affected the pol­li­na­tion process, lead­ing to lower fruit set and reduced olive yields.”

Zeynep Belger, the founder of Zayto, told Olive Oil Times that late-spring rain also had dam­aged the olive trees as they were flow­er­ing. She now expects to pro­duce 50 per­cent less olive oil than she pre­vi­ously antic­i­pated.

“It is a farmer’s life; every year comes with dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances, and this year is no dif­fer­ent,” she told Olive Oil Times.

Unlike many oth­ers, Belger said the drought had severely lim­ited her pro­duc­tion in the pre­vi­ous two crop years, led her to invest in a drip irri­ga­tion sys­tem, and hoped this would be a rebound sea­son.

While cold and rainy weather has ham­pered olive devel­op­ment in west­ern Turkey, suc­ces­sive 7.8 and 7.5 mag­ni­tude earth­quakes shook south­east­ern Turkey and north­ern Syria on February 6^th, result­ing in 60,000 deaths, hun­dreds of thou­sands of dis­place­ments, and an esti­mated €30.6 bil­lion in dam­ages.

“The earth­quake was, of course, one of the dis­as­ters of the cen­tury, caus­ing dam­age to fac­to­ries and olive groves,” Tan said. ​“The wounds are being healed with gov­ern­ment mea­sures and an under­stand­ing of cor­po­rate and social respon­si­bil­ity and a total strug­gle. Things are get­ting bet­ter every day.”

Looking ahead to the rest of the sum­mer, Ozpinar said low tem­per­a­tures in November accom­pa­nied by rain in December might increase oil accu­mu­la­tion and improve har­vest fore­casts.

“Due to poor fruit set on trees, olive fruits will ripen faster and will be big­ger,” he said. ​“It is good for table olive pro­duc­tion, but that is the last thing we want when it comes to olive oil.”

“We will have to har­vest ear­lier with low olive oil con­tent in order not to see fruit drops and rot­ten olives on the ground,” Ozpinar added. ​“Low tem­per­a­tures in November and rainy days at the begin­ning of December may increase the per­cent­age of oil in olive fruits. That would be the ideal con­di­tion.”

“Considering the chal­lenges faced by Turkey’s olive groves, the best con­di­tions for olive growth and oil pro­duc­tion involve mod­er­ate tem­per­a­tures and bal­anced rain­fall,” Alan of NovaVera added. ​“These tem­per­a­tures also affect the under­ground water sup­ply, which is declin­ing rapidly.”

“As a result, there isn’t enough water for proper irri­ga­tion, affect­ing the qual­ity of water­ing,” she said. ​“It’s cru­cial to imple­ment effec­tive pest and dis­ease con­trol to pro­tect the olive trees dur­ing this sen­si­tive time and ensure their health and pro­duc­tiv­ity.”

While acknowl­edg­ing that it is still too early to esti­mate the com­ing har­vest, Ozpinar pre­dicts that the national olive oil yield may fin­ish as much as 10 to 15 per­cent below the five-year aver­age of 254,600 tons based on cur­rent con­di­tions and mar­ket behav­ior.

“An almost 80 per­cent increase in olive oil buy­ing price of whole­sale buy­ers in the last two months cor­rob­o­rates the expec­ta­tion of a scarce har­vest,” he said.

The 2023/24 crop year may not be as fruit­ful as the pre­vi­ous one, but Tan remains opti­mistic about the future of Turkey’s table olive and olive oil sec­tors.

“On the other hand, Turkey is one of the coun­tries least affected by the neg­a­tive global cli­mate change in terms of olive cul­ti­va­tion, which causes our pro­duc­tion quan­tity and qual­ity to show bet­ter devel­op­ment com­pared to other coun­tries,” he said.

“In other words, I am hope­ful for this year, and I esti­mate that we can be an impor­tant pro­ducer and exporter coun­try again with the trans­fer of stocks from this year,” Tan added.

With another poor har­vest loom­ing in Spain, Tan believes Turkey will con­tinue gain­ing mar­ket share and increas­ing its olive oil exports.

“For the 2023/24 crop year, as long as the pro­por­tional decline in yields con­tin­ues in other coun­tries, espe­cially Spain, as it did last year, it would not be unre­al­is­tic to expect Turkey to increase its pro­duc­tion and exports with its total bal­ance sheet and to take a deeper place in new mar­kets,” he said. ​“With this gen­eral assess­ment, we are hope­ful, and we will wait and see.”

While the impacts of cli­mate change have not been nearly as evi­dent in Turkey as they were last year in the Western Mediterranean basin, pro­duc­ers across the coun­try expressed their con­cerns about the impact of drought and extreme weather on olive farm­ers in the coun­try.

However, like Tan, Alan is also hope­ful. She said olive oil yields could be max­i­mized this year by fol­low­ing cer­tain agri­cul­tural best prac­tices, and the con­tin­ued adop­tion of sus­tain­able farm­ing tech­niques would mit­i­gate future impacts of drought and extreme weather.

“With proper agri­cul­tural prac­tices and care­ful man­age­ment, it is pos­si­ble that the pro­duc­tion could still remain above aver­age despite the chal­lenges faced this year,” she said. ​“Let us empha­size the sig­nif­i­cance of adopt­ing sus­tain­able agri­cul­tural meth­ods in olive groves across Turkey.”

“By imple­ment­ing prac­tices that pro­mote envi­ron­men­tal con­ser­va­tion, respon­si­ble water usage, and ecosys­tem preser­va­tion, we can play a cru­cial role in mit­i­gat­ing the impact of cli­mate change,” Alan added. ​“Together, as farm­ers and stew­ards of the land, our col­lec­tive efforts can lead to a more sus­tain­able and resilient olive indus­try for gen­er­a­tions to come.”

Belger believes that drought will con­tinue to be a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge for Western Anatolian pro­duc­ers, with rain falling at all the wrong moments for olive devel­op­ment.

“Looking at the long-term impli­ca­tions of the drought, my thought is that the small farm­ers who can­not invest in a water­ing sys­tem will suf­fer the most,” she said. ​“Extensive farm­ers who pro­duce on an indus­trial scale, with large invest­ments in infra­struc­ture, will pre­vail.”

“The land­scape for high-qual­ity olive oil pro­duc­ers around the world might be impacted, and pas­sion­ate con­sumers should be ready to pay the true value of an arti­sanal prod­uct,” Belger con­cluded.