Olive Oil Producers Turn to Tourists to Combat Soaring Costs, Extreme Weather

Maria Angela Macchia jams a 10-foot pole topped with an electric comb into the upper reaches of a 200-year-old olive tree and revs the engine. The long-toothed tool, created to extract stubborn fruit from the highest branches, vigorously shakes the crown of the tree, sending a trickle of olives cascading to the green nets below. To an onlooker, the stream is impressive. But Macchia frowns: The yield is only a fraction of what she got when she shook the same tree the previous year at I Moricci, her 19th century farmhouse on Tuscan hillside outside of Peccioli, southeast of Pisa.

Extreme rains across Italy in the spring knocked many of the olive flowers off Macchia’s 900 trees before the fruit could form, and she’s expecting this year’s oil output to plummet by about three-quarters. To help make up some of the earnings shortfall, Macchia has been hosting groups of tourists, organized through the Rotterdam-based vacation planners Triptoscana. The visitors stay on her farm and help pick the olives and explore the region during down time. At the end, they get a half-liter bottle of oil to take home.