The olive harvest on Lake Garda began on Wednesday, 14 October 2026, at the mill of the San Felice del Benaco agricultural cooperative, where Confagricoltura Brescia, the local farmers’ association, presented the 2026 olive oil season. The organisation expects one of the best years in the last six or seven, with heavily laden trees and fruit in excellent health, something not seen since 2018-2020, according to its president, Oscar Scalmana.
A long-awaited year after difficult seasons
Scalmana says the satisfaction is greater because it follows poor harvests, rising production costs and ever-thinner margins for farms. The summer heat, with peaks of 38-40 degrees Celsius and warm nights, stressed the trees and slowed some processes, but it also limited the main pests: the olive fruit fly, the stink bug and euzophera.
Marco Penitenti, vice president of the olive-growing section, describes plant health as being at its best, with the harvesting techniques learned in recent years able to produce oils of exceptional quality.
Fruit ripening was slower, especially in non-irrigated groves. As a result, there was no need to bring the harvest forward to the first days of October, as happened in other seasons to limit pest damage. The core of the season falls between mid and late October, in the traditional olive-growing calendar of the Garda area.
Protecting groves from climate extremes
Rita Rocca, president of the olive-growing section, argues that farming techniques are needed to protect crops from climate extremes: managing grass cover to limit soil heating, using rock dust to reduce sun exposure on the leaves, and making careful use of water resources.
Olive growing in the Brescia area and the San Felice cooperative
The province of Brescia has 1,925 hectares of olive groves, 81 per cent of the olive-growing area in Lombardy. In 2025, provincial production was about 3,200 tonnes of olives, 90 per cent of the regional total, compared with 4,800 tonnes in 2024, with a yield of 1.65 tonnes per hectare. The area is unchanged from 2023 but down 2.8 per cent from 2019.
Scalmana says that promoting the oil must go hand in hand with preserving existing groves, recovering abandoned land and making new productive investments, because olive growing protects the Garda landscape and looks after the territory.
The choice of the San Felice del Benaco mill was no accident. The cooperative, founded on 27 October 1946, turns eighty this year. It has more than 400 members, about 320 hectares of olive groves and over 71,000 trees. It has the largest mill in Lombardy by volume of olives processed: in a good year it presses about 1,000 tonnes, and this season’s volumes could be higher. The mill processes on average between 18 and 20 per cent of the olives produced in the region.
The press conference was attended by the leadership of Confagricoltura Brescia, of the olive-growing section and of the San Felice cooperative, together with Marzia Manovali, mayor of San Felice del Benaco.
