From Facing Our Biggest Threat to an Unexpected Breakthrough...
The 2025 Harvest, Part 1 – Our Biggest Threat: La Mosca
What has been one of the most feared sights this year for olive farmers across Italy?
La Mosca (the olive fly).
The fly punctures the olive and lays eggs inside. Once that happens, the fruit begins to break down, and the oil quality is destroyed. And when the flies arrive, it isn’t just one or two. There are thousands.
Once the flies descend upon an olive grove, farmers can easily lose 80-100% of their crop. What made this year even more frightening is that historically, the flies arrive in November.
This would at least be near the end of the harvest, which would mean farmers would still have been able to harvest some of their olives. However now, in central Italy, they are arriving a full month earlier.
This is just one of the many things we must adapt to as our climate changes.
How We Protected Our Groves (Naturally)
Because Libellula is rooted in regenerative and organic farming, we don’t fight nature with chemicals. Instead, we work with methods that protect the tree without harming our ecosystem.
To fight the la mosca, we use kaolin. This is powder made from mineral-rich stone, which we mix with water and spray lightly over the olives' leaves and fruit.
It creates a fine protective coating, making it difficult for flies to settle and lay eggs.
Kaolin does not kill the flies, it simply encourages them to move elsewhere.
Our farmers in each of their groves also kept watch on any signs of the fly. So that if they saw any signs of an invasion, they could immediately warn the others to check that their kaolin was fully dusting their olive trees.
Which is why, as we always say, the long-term solution is not individual; it must become collective.
Because if only one farmer uses kaolin, the flies will just move on to his neighbor’s olive grove.
But if farmers across the region use kaolin together, we protect not only one grove, but the valley itself.
And if the la mosca can find no nearby olive groves to lay their eggs in, then we can make a significant, long-term dent in their ability to lay eggs and reduce their population overall.
Thank you to all of you for being part of the Libllula family and helping make our collective of farmers possible.
The 2025 Harvest, Part 2 – From Disaster to Breakthrough
This year, we arrived at the first day of the harvest with one overwhelming feeling: joy. After anticipating seasons of extremes, the summer here in Sabina was kinder to the trees than we could have hoped. The hot summer days were often softened by evening rain.
September itself felt almost perfect: warm, mild, calm as we watched the olives continue to grow. And then we made a decision that surprised many of our neighbors…
We started the olive harvest on October 4th.
A Changing Harvest Landscape
For most farmers around us, October 4th feels “too early.” But the old harvest calendar isn’t reliable anymore.
Many families here remember their grandfathers and grandmothers harvesting in January or even February. Now, if you wait that long, there may not be any good oil left in the olives.
So we began on October 4th and, in true harvest fashion, the very first day did not go as planned.
The day that the mill opened for the season, we were to be the very first farmers to use it. But when we arrived, with 1,300 kilos of olives, they realized the mill had a problem preventing the machines from running.
Now, this may not seem like a huge disaster. But we must press the olives within a few hours of picking them, otherwise the olives will start to lose their polyphenols (antioxidants), begin the oxidation process, and even the taste of the resulting pressed oil will be unpleasant.
Luckily, we hadn’t unloaded everything yet.
And because Camillo had spent the summer visiting other mills in our area (there are nearly 20 in the region) and building relationships with them, we were able to pivot quickly. We drove over to another mill nearby, one that also has an excellent reputation.
This became one of the most important developments of our harvest.
An Unexpected Gift
What began as a challenge became an opportunity: to learn, to compare, and to improve our oil even more.
We started to track the oil day by day, mill by mill, grove by grove.
We would press small batches at one mill, then compare the oil produced from the same harvest at the other mill, tasting differences in fruitiness, bitterness, spiciness, and aroma.
For Camillo, who this past year became certified as “a assaggiatore di olio di oliva” (or olive oil sommelier) and spends more hours than we can count studying the details of production, this was a breakthrough year.
In the past, we held our oil in only a few large tanks.
This year, we were able to expand to 13 separate tankers, each one kept distinct with its own number, origin grove, pressing date, and harvest notes (weather, humidity, and other conditions that influence flavor).
This has allowed him to go beyond just knowing how to grow the best olives, but to also learn about how to blend our different olive cultivars in new and interesting ways.
Now, this is not because we want everything to taste the same.
It’s the opposite.
Camillo says it often: you can’t standardize nature. A grove in the valley produces something different than one higher in the hills. Picking the olives on a humid day can taste different than those picked on a dry one. That is the beauty of nature.
Keeping our olive presses separate helps us understand the season more clearly and blend more thoughtfully, a little of this grove combined with a little of that one, to create the most beautiful Classico and Riserva possible.
We are even experimenting with producing a special, third blend of extra virgin olive oil! Which we hope to share more about soon (as Camillo is still testing different cultivar blends and pairings to find one worthy of sharing with you).
Julia & Camillo
