🌍 Last week we were at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (Germany) for the annual ClimateCropping meeting.
👩🔬👨🔬 The AgroecoliveLab team, represented by Roberto García, Beatriz Ruiz, and José Liétor, presented the progress of our life cycle assessment work applied to long-term field trials across several European countries.
🌱 The goal? To provide solid data demonstrating the benefits of sustainable practices over conventional ones in a wide variety of crops.
🌱 Scale-it aims to drive the agroecological transition of olive groves, exploring innovative solutions to enhance the sector’s sustainability, improve resource management, and contribute to climate change mitigation through regenerative farming practices.
👉 We invite you to subscribe to its Newsletter, the best way to stay up to date with the progress and results as they unfold.
The prestigious journal Nature Sustainability has recently published a highly relevant article confirming the significant decline that Andalusian olive groves are undergoing.
😔 In the words of the authors: The cultivation of steep, erosion-prone land, combined with the replacement of manure by chemical fertilizers and the widespread adoption of clean weeding, has reduced soil water retention and exacerbated
runoff, making production systems more vulnerable to droughts and extreme rainfall events.
➡️Full article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01628-3
🫒 Thousands of olive growers are already working to reverse this situation. On our website, you can find some of the key steps to achieve it: https://agroecolivelab.com/en/home/
Our team has actively contributed to the summer Newsletter of the ClimateCropping project, a project that aims to quantify, through the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, the environmental impact of different crops from various European countries under different management practices, with a particular focus on comparing more sustainable practices with conventional ones.
Extra information here: Newsletter ClimateCropping
At the beginning of June, part of the AgroecoliveLab team held the workshop “Regenerating the soil. The magic of cover crops” for the 5th-grade students of CEIP Nuestra Señora de Zocueca (Bailén, Spain). This scientific outreach activity was part of the School of Science initiative, organized by the University of Jaén. During the workshop, the children learned why it is so important to protect the soil from erosion and how cover crops act as a key ally in this process. They also discovered the crucial role of soil organic matter and how earthworms help transform it into compost, a natural and effective way to enrich the soil and improve its fertility.
Between June 3rd and 5th, our colleague José Liétor led a series of three participatory workshops on CO₂ credit certification mechanisms in the voluntary olive grove market, as part of the C-Olivar Project. The sessions were held at various cooperatives within the Estepa PDO, covering the Spanish municipalities of Puente Genil (Córdoba) and Estepa (Seville). In total, around 100 farmers learned first-hand about the growing carbon credit market applicable to the olive oil sector, as well as the management practices that can help them access this promising incentive. The workshop series received significant media coverage, including a radio interview on Cadena Ser.
Link to the news article (Spanish). Link to te radio interview (Spanish).
Our estimate of the potential income for the entire DOP Estepa (Sevilla, Spain) has been published, in the event of implementing a carbon farming project based on more sustainable management practices. These practices would increase the capacity of the olive groves to capture atmospheric CO₂, resulting in a greater contribution to climate change mitigation. Link (Spanish).
At the beginning of June, the DOP Estepa presented the “Good Practices Manual for Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Olive Groves”, developed by our colleague José Liétor. This tool, which was very well received by farmers, has become a key reference document for clarifying concepts that are often confused, such as sequestration, balance, footprint, and carbon credits.
Link to the Flipbook to read the full manual (Spanish).
