Tuscany's 2026 olive harvest starts early with healthy crop, but extra virgin prices set to rise

Tuscany's olive harvest has started early this year, with picking already under way in Val di Cornia and growers reporting a healthier and more abundant crop than in 2025. La Nazione reported from Florence on 24 September that an unusually hot summer allowed the trees to ripen evenly, pulling the 2026 oil campaign forward.

Field conditions point to a larger crop

Paolo Di Gaetano, a producer in the area and vice-president of the consortium that protects Tuscan IGP olive oil, told La Nazione that the season looks better than the last one. “It will be a good harvest, better than last year. Good quantity, very little olive fruit fly, recent rains have made the olives beautiful and healthy — not only here, where we have already started picking, but more or less across Tuscany,” he said.

Letizia Cesani, president of Coldiretti Toscana, confirmed the same picture in the groves while flagging the variable that decides the economics of the season. “The olives are there, there are many of them, beautiful and healthy; what remains, as every year, is the unknown of the yield, which we will only discover at the mill,” she said. First indications are expected within a week, as harvesting on the coast gets going, and Cesani described that trend as indicative for the whole region. Growers and mills face what she called an intense month and a half.

Costs, not volumes, drive prices

A larger crop is not expected to soften prices. Di Gaetano said quotations will rise because costs have increased along the entire chain, citing agricultural diesel, labour and the electricity used for irrigation and grove maintenance. That splits the 2026 season in two: Cesani called the crop year very positive in the groves and the opposite on the market side.

Price and value benchmarks

Recent official figures set out the scale of the Tuscan segment and its current price level:

• Ismea's latest survey, taken in mid-September, quoted 12 euros per kilogram ex-farm on the Siena market — an origin price recorded before the new campaign, not a retail bottle price.
• Toscano IGP olive oil reached 32 million euros in production value, according to the Ismea-Qualivita 2025 report with data referring to 2024.
• Exports of Toscano IGP oil were worth 41 million euros in the same dataset.

Stocks, imports and labelling

Cesani said Tuscany has no inventory overhang this year, treating that as a point of strength, and located the problem in market behaviour instead. She attributed price formation to what she called oil traffickers, arguing that Tuscan firms make the best extra virgin oil in the world but produce at a loss when costs exceed revenue. Insufficient profitability, she said, is one of the causes behind the abandonment of thousands of olive trees in Tuscany.

Coldiretti Toscana has pressed the case both institutionally and in public, including a hard-edged protest in Florence on 10 June, against what it describes as unfair competition from operators importing oil and blends from Tunisia, Morocco and other countries. Cesani pointed to transparency as the remedy: writing clearly what buyers are actually purchasing, a practice already applied at farmers' markets that in her view now needs to work at scale.

One rule change is already in force. In Italy a blend of virgin and extra virgin oil can no longer be marketed as extra virgin olive oil, which Cesani called a blow to traffickers and the end of a major deception of consumers. She said that is not sufficient on its own and called for more checks at ports, more technology to verify origin, and an amendment to the customs code so that only goods made with Italian ingredients can carry Made in Italy — oil included.