How Olive Oil Producers Are Creating Safer Groves for Birds
Birds in olive grove photo credit Mark Hall
Is your olive oil habit endangering birds? An odd question at first glance, but once you consider the evidence, it’s worth considering. Every year, millions of birds are killed during the olive harvest. In Andalusia alone, an estimated 2.6 million songbirds were once killed during harvest season. The vast majority of the deaths occur on vast olive groves during night harvests when machines are deployed.
Birds at Risk
Olive harvesting is hardly the only agricultural practice that endangers birds. Human activity, primarily due to agriculture, have put one-third of all U.S. bird species in high to moderate population decline, with one in eight species across the world threatened with extinction. Birds are melodious and beautiful, but we also need them—which makes their doom not just a matter of aesthetic or ethical concern, but also a deeply financial one.
Why Birds Matter
An owl box
Birds are a link in the eco-chain, contributing billions of dollars in economic activity every year (for free) via their essential roles in everything from pollination to pest control. Healthy bird populations also help ensure a robust birdwatching economy, which alone contributes an esteemed $279 billion to the U.S. economy annually through tourism dollars.
Thankfully, the olive oil business is taking action. Some of the most potentially destructive practices are changing. Spain and Portugal have banned the practice of night harvests, and individual producers are adjusting practices to make their groves safer for birds. And some are finding unexpected benefits in the process.
Creating a Bird Friendly Habitat
Vegetation cover
Eliminating pesticides
Increasing biodiversity
Building nests and nest boxes
Providing food
Vegetation cover at Campo Palacio Marques de Viana
Ensuring that an olive grove is safe and open for birds is straight-forward, but far from simple, says Aránzazu Gómez Gil, the international commerce manager at Patio de Viana in Spain.
“It’s necessary to start by respecting 100% of the vegetation cover, eliminating pesticides and increasing biodiversity,” Gil says. “You have to establish a friendly habitat where birds thrive, have food and can nest without problems.”
At Patio de Viana, they take extra measures to encourage the presence of birds by installing artificial nests and floating islands on top of the water of their reservoirs and planting bird-friendly cereals in different areas of the farm.
“Through these practices, we’ve discovered an excellent system to biologically combat pests in the groves,” Gil says, explaining that the birds snack on many of the naturally present olive foes that would otherwise have to be targeted with sprays.
Bird box in olive grove
At Acushla in Quinta do Prado in Vila Flor, Portugal, director of marketing Clara Paredes Castro notes that in addition to creating a diverse estate that includes thousands of olive trees that are embedded in a “vast ecosystem of bees, birds, sheep and other living beings, which encourages excellent olive development and flavorful olive oil,” they also actively recruit birds.
“We have nest boxes for predatory birds like barn owls, kestrels and smaller owls in our olive grove,” Castro says. “Their presence helps us prevent olive pests like rodents, snakes and other small animals.”
Chiara Lungarotti, CEO of the winery and olive oil producer Lungarotti Radici in Umbria, says they have worked to create a biodiverse habitat around their estate, which helps ensure a natural balance and reduces the need for costly artificial farming interventions
“We are fond of some of our local birds in particular,” Lungarotti confesses. “We’ve found that healthy populations of these falcons keep a natural balance in the olive groves, because they are predators and naturally eliminate and discourage the presence of problematic pests, and even certain smaller birds that might otherwise eat the olives. They also enhance soil health with their droppings, without fertilizer.”
Reducing fertilizers and sprays—even organic ones—also naturally reduces a brand’s carbon footprint, because these inputs require gas-guzzling tractors to deploy them.
Harvesting Safely
Paco and Rosa Vañó at Patio de Viana
But what about harvesting? The banning of night harvests has been a boon for bird life, because many olive trees are home to nesting birds. But other measures are also often necessary to ensure bird safety.
“Many songbirds find refuge and nest in olive trees,” says Gil. “Certain harvesting methods, such as large-scale mechanical vibration with special ‘riding machines,’ are dangerous for birds. They are working almost 24 hours and can cause the death of a significant number of these nesting birds.”
At Patio de Viana, they cultivate olive tree groves with a density of 100 trees per hectare. At harvest time, the team deploys a gentle vibration technique for a few seconds at a time.
“This process is carried out throughout the day, rather than continuously, which significantly minimizes disturbance to nesting birds or other wildlife,” Gil says.
What Olive Oil Lovers Should Know
So … is your olive oil habit endangering or potentially helping birds?
Lungarotti groves
“To identify the most sustainable EVOOs that are in harmony with the environment and birds, it’s important to look into the sustainable practices certified by each brand,” Castillo de Canena Olive Juice’s U.K. and American export manager María Parias Fernández de Heredia says. “In our case, external certifications like the one from AENOR Regenerative Farming provide a reliable guarantee that what we do in our olive grove is in favor of nature.
Lungarotti says that seeking out certifications and also doing basic research on brands reveals a lot.
“It’s usually easy to tell if a producer is smaller, using hand-harvesting or smaller mechanical harvesting techniques just by looking at their website or social media,” she says.
While it’s tough to answer the question with complete confidence—there are no, as yet, bird-safe certifications available to olive oil producers, as there are with dolphins and tuna, or bats and tequila—identifying bird-safe olive oil is often as simple as seeking out olive oil that has other stringent environmental certifications.