Olive trees go where vineyards once went in Bordeaux

rance only produces 5,000 of the 130,000 tonnes of olive oil it consumes every year. “This is a superb opportunity to help all those ailing farmers”, believes Yannick Masmondet, a former Bordeaux winegrower who has spent time in Morocco and returned to Aude in the South of France after Covid to set up Oil’ive Green. The aim is to help producers looking to diversify their business.

Three years after planting – and not including any possible grants – the entrepreneur guarantees winegrowers a net profit margin of €7,000 to €8,000/hectare. “We have partnered with companies specialising in marketing oils who offer a fixed income per litre over 15 years to secure their supplies”, explains Masmondet.

“That’s what we used to get paid for winegrowing before the crisis”, is the calculation by Yorick Lavaud at Domaine Les Carmels in Langoiran, Bordeaux. Lavaud lost no time in filling out the forms to benefit from vine-pull schemes and replace three of his ten hectares of vines with olive trees. They will produce approximately 4,500 litres of oil. “I am going to plant them on the clayey hillsides in Cadillac that are not very suitable for other crops”, he explains. “The grants will help me offset the cost of planting the trees, around €25,000/hectare over five years”.

Lavaud hopes the project will get off the ground in the autumn. “I will use Viti Morley as a service provider to prune the trees and harvest them by machine. For soil maintenance and plant protection, I will use the equipment I already have for my vines. Labour issues will be a lot less challenging and my farm will be more resilient to disease and adverse weather events”.

Yannick Masmondet says he has signed contracts with other Bordeaux winegrowers like Yorick Lavaud with areas covering anything from 2 to 100 hectares. “To diversify their income, large co-operative wineries are also considering taking shares in the capital of the mill that we are going to build near Sauveterre-de-Guyenne”, he says.

From Bordeaux to the Italian border, Oil’ive Green aims to plant 10,000 hectares to produce food-grade olive oil. “And we should plant 50,000 hectares on uncultivated land to provide a large oil company with fuel-grade oil”.