This year’s harvest can be expressed in some straightforward, simple numbers: 3 people, 3 weeks, 8 presses. 1960 kilos (4321 pounds). 303 litres. Average yield 14%. 73 trees.

After one of Puglia’s driest summers with record breaking temperatures we still didn’t know in September if there would be a healthy harvest in October. There were olives but they were so small. We waited for rain to plump them up a bit but it never came. Indeed the trees did produce a healthy harvest but the olives were scattered among our 120 trees on five acres, requiring a lot of moving of nets, crates, olives (obviously), and a daily strategy. Two dogs and four cats usually followed our movements taking their supervisory positions somewhere on the net under the tree we were just about to harvest, their expression of being helpful.

What the numbers don’t say is that 3 days into the harvest we lost our companion of 14 years, Zibibbo, who despite having only three legs (two of which fully functioned), maintained his position as the alpha, and kept a protective watch over everyone and everything. He was ever present. He was born here and died here, the land having held him his entire life. And he never missed a minute of an olive harvest.

An unfortunate reality: Xylella fastidiosa

Another sobering fact overshadowed this year’s romp in the olive trees, the first signs of xyllela. Xyllela fastidosa is a disease that is killing olive trees in Puglia and has been steadily marching up the peninsula towards us since it was first detected about 60 miles south in 2013. One third of Puglia’s 60 million trees have become infected or died since 2013. South of us in the area of Salento, olive oil presses have completely shut down, been dismantled, and the equipment sold off as there are no more olive trees producing. Sadder still is that there is no known cure, yet. Puglia produces over 40% of Italy’s olive oil and 12% of the world’s olive oil, so this has rippling effects through the world economy. Not to mention the gut wrenching sadness one feels when an olive tree, that has lived for thousands of years, and has possibly been in a family for generations, succumbs to the disease and dies out. It’s serious. Every year we have seen it get closer. Our land is currently in the infected zone which means they no longer test the trees as it is assumed they are all infected. Although a healthy tree resists the disease better than unhealthy tree, whether the trees are organic or not doesn’t seem to make much difference to xyllela (but it’s still easy to convince yourself that somehow your trees are different, aka emotional denial) . Until you see it on your land. That moment of reckoning came to us during this year’s harvest when we observed dead and drying branches for no reason on our otherwise healthy trees. Xylella has arrived.

Many scientists and really smart people have been working on this issue for years and can explain the science and the overall picture better than me, including Caleb’s brother Cain Burdeau who is a journalist. (Cain’s four-part series in the Olive Oil Times). Simply by searching “Italy’s olive trees dying” you’ll get images you don’t want to emotionally process, and a spoonful of oil might seem even more precious.

Grafting resistant varieties in the spring

As there is still no proven cure for Xyllela there is a glimmer, maybe a small one but a glimmer still, of hope. They have discovered a handful of olive types that appear to resist the bacteria and these varieties can be grafted onto existing trees. The most popular of these is Leccino, a variety widely planted and cultivated especially in Tuscany. It grows quickly, produces a lot and has a high yield. But these studies have only be done over the last 7 years or so, which when you’re talking about olive trees that have lived over millennia seems like a very short time to be certain of anything. So this still leaves questions. Will these varieties continue to be resistant after another few years, decades, centuries? Will grafting and planting only a few types of olives produce a monoculture that is more susceptible to other diseases in the future? And finally, they say there are over 500 varieties of olives alone in Italy. What happens when these hundreds are reduced to a handful and oil has the same taste all across the peninsula. What is lost?

And yet one feels compelled to act in the face of what is happening, and so, we graft.

Caleb started grafting resistant varieties onto our trees in the spring of 2020, experimenting with trees big and small, sometimes onto wild small ones that pop up around the land and others on the ‘secolare’, the centuries-old trees. From the grafts done in 2020, we harvested our first Leccino olive this autumn, a hopeful sign! Next spring we plan to graft aggressively, as many trees as we can, choosing some of the old ones we love the most, with a regiment as serious as the harvest. Xyllela is here.

On the front of the 2021 olive oil tag is a drawing of one of our oldest trees, one where we found xyllela.

The 2021 harvest

But back to this year. Because besides xyllela coming and Zibibbo leaving we three had a joyous harvest, sunny weather, tired arms and olive stained knees for the month we harvested. And as always, our trees gave us an amazing gift- delicious extra virgin olive oil.