Risca Grande

Sustainable food production – the example of the success story of Risca Grande 

It is a cool Saturday morning at the end of October. A group of six students from the Beja College of Agriculture and their lecturer in olive growing are heading for Santa Iria, 30 km away. Shortly after leaving the village, they turn on to a gravel road. A road sign shows them the direction: Risca Grande – extra virgin olive oil. The destination for the trip was carefully chosen by the lecturer Carlos Filipe: after all, Risca Grande has become a model business for organic olive growing in Portugal.

Searching for a new vocation

Risca Grande is still quite a young company. Through its foundation in 2007, almost a year before the start of the world economic crisis, the company was legally constituted; this is what a family with Swiss roots had set in motion shortly after the turn of the millennium to provide them with a livelihood in their adoptive region, the Lower Alentejo. The priority was the wish to produce a healthy food product. It may seem obvious that olive oil was pre-destined for such a role, but the ancient Romans were already aware of the health benefits of this foodstuff. “The conditions here are ideal for growing organic olives,” says Andreas Bernhard; he already knew this when the head of the family purchased the 90 hectares of land with olive trees as much as 500 years old.

 

Those who have a choice…

But anyone who stands in front of a supermarket olive oil shelf these days knows that you have to be especially careful not to be palmed off with an adulterated olive oil from different sources, or what is erroneously described as top quality extra virgin oil. But what may well have less serious consequences for consumers, often has a negative effect on the environment. Probably the most serious environmental problem linked to conventionally grown olives is soil erosion, caused by inadequate control of weeds and preparation of the soil. Low levels of organic matter in agricultural soil are conducive to soil erosion, something that typically occurs in the Mediterranean region. One of the Swiss producers’ key objectives in terms of organic agriculture is to increase the amount of organic matter in the soil and counteract humus depletion.

Organic alternatives in olive growing

Alfred Zehnder, Andreas Bernhard’s business partner and stepson, is responsible for the olive trees and for quality assurance at Risca Grande. The dynamic 30-year-old explains to the students on a tour around the olive groves how he protects the soil from erosion. It is still difficult to imagine that the little shoots that start appearing everywhere with the first rains after the long dry summer will, by the spring, be providing the olive trees with stiff competition for the available water. To prevent this happening, the weeds and the grasses in the ground between the trees are not ploughed in or killed off with environmentally harmful herbicides; on the contrary, the green matter is cut three or four times a year, shredded and spread between the trees. “One of the advantages is that the soil stays moist because of the vegetable mulch and this promotes the life of the soil,” Alfred Zehnder explains enthusiastically, while the interested visitors accompany him on the next stage, past the meadow where a small herd of dairy cattle are grazing.

 

Composting – Recycling agricultural by-products

Behind a hill, they can see Risca Grande’s composting station. That’s where there are ten long compositing pits from where clouds of water vapour float towards the morning sun. A mixture of olive pomace, which is produced in large quantities during the pressing of olive oil in their own mill, olive leaves, tree prunings and manure is recycled here with the help of thousands of micro-organisms, and simultaneously converted into organic fertiliser with a high proportion of nutrients. Using this in the olive farm is the second pillar of soil improvement.
Although the olive pomace compost demands a lot of time and effort until it achieves the necessary maturity, this practice of recycling the farm’s own by-products in a closed operational cycle, is interesting from an economic point of view.
The calculations of the economic efficiency of compost production on the farm show that the cost of replacing nutrients from the olive groves by purchasing alternative organic or mineral fertilisers authorised for use in organic farming exceeds the cost of producing the compost.

The current situation in organic farming in Portugal

By this point, the young students have gained their first impressions of the principles of agriculture in harmony with nature. In contrast with central Europe, organic foodstuffs in Portugal are still a niche market, and only a minority of people are aware of what lies behind their production. In 2010, when the country was already being affected by recession and the economic crisis, the average per capita expenditure of the Portuguese on organic products was only about €2. In comparison, in the same period, a Swiss person spent the equivalent of €152 on average on organic products (see Fig. 1). But consumers could not yet appreciate what Portuguese producers in crisis already seem to have realised: organic farming offers solutions for the economic crisis! In comparison with the previous year, in 2010 there was a huge increase in the number of hectares devoted to organic farming, by 49,594 to a total of 201,045.

The outlook for employers and employees in the organic sector

But why does this sustainable type of agriculture give us a ray of hope? One powerful argument is that it is still worth working in this area. According to the 2005 report on the German government’s agricultural policy, in organic farming there are 34% more jobs – in relation to the area under cultivation. While in conventional agriculture, many stages in the process are done away with by using chemical and synthetic products, in the case of organic farmers the work is spread throughout the year. In conventional olive growing for example, liquid fertilisers are simply introduced into the irrigation system and the growth of wild water sprouts is prevented by chemicals. Both of these work stages mean that, at Risca Grande, there is manual work for at least two people for several weeks. To cope with the additional demands of organic certification, both in the olive groves and in the management of the business, Risca Grande has created two new jobs for one permanent employee and another member of the family since 2010. During the olive harvest, another seven helpers from Santa Iria and the surrounding area are contracted, including four young men. Given the high rate of unemployment among Portuguese men (aged 15 – 24), which in October 2012 amounted to 38.1%, an increase of 6.1% compared with the same month of the previous year, for many people the future is not bright. This means that people’s gratitude even for temporary work is that much greater.
Meanwhile, the group of visitors has reached the mill. Here Andreas Bernhard goes into action. He is in charge of turning the olives into the prize-winning extra virgin olive oil. Working together with his son Samuel over the coming weeks until late into the night, he will be extracting the olive oil from the fruit that was freshly picked that morning. Owing to demand from Risca Grande’s clients, who are mostly abroad, this year the oil from the new harvest will leave the stainless steel tanks before Christmas to be bottled in glass bottles. The option of exporting the product in large containers is something that is flatly rejected by the management. It is essential to retain jobs for their own staff. And this approach has another advantage: “Only because the whole process takes place at Risca Grande can we guarantee the highest standards of quality,” says Andreas Bernhard.

Conclusion: organic farming is multi-functional

When you consider that this year’s price on the world market of conventional extra virgin olive oil from Spain ranged from €1.85 to €2.50 per litre, the €7.40 price-tag for a litre of Risca Grande olive oil seems horrendous at first sight. However, this superficial comparison is not fair. Conventional suppliers can only sell their product so cheaply because the cost of making good the environmental damage they cause, such as the cleaning of polluted ground water, is borne by the tax-payer. In contrast, the subsidies for organic farmers are only recognition of their acceptance of society-wide responsibilities alongside the actual production of foodstuffs. This includes caring for and preserving the cultural landscape as well as active nature conservation.

(Fig. 3).