Life Cycle Assessment of olive cultivation in Italy: comparison of three management systems

The aim of this study is to evaluate the potential environmental life-cycle impacts of olives produced in three management systems of olive tree integrated with natural grassland. In Italy, olive cultivation is one of the key crops. In fact, in terms of cultivation area, olives are in the second place, behind the wheat cultivation. In terms of production, olive trees take 6th place, just behind grapes, wheat, maize, tomatoes and apples. In terms of production, Italy is in the third place in the world, behind Spain and Greece. Their share in global production in 2016 amounted to 10.9% (2092175 tonnes). Olive's trees occupy an area of 1165562 ha (FAOSTAT 2016). Olive trees can be cultivated in different farm systems: organic, traditional, silvopastoral and intensive. These systems differ in terms of both the costs incurred and the impact on the environment. Olive orchards integrated with cereals is the earliest agroforestry system in the Mediterranean area and characterize plantation crop and multipurpose tree systems, that improve nutrient cycling and erosion control (Ramachandran Nair, 1993). Currently, organic farming is becoming more popular in agriculture. For instance, in Italy, more olive trees are grown in organic farming, a system spread in the recent years (Melelli and Fatichenti, 2010). Organic system is supposed to have better performance in reducing environmental influence in environmental burdens than conventional because of lower environmental impacts on resources depletion, highlighting higher efficiency in reducing fossil fuel consumption. However it is not at all times shown in the literature (Mohamend et al., 2014; Salomone and Ioppolo, 2012). This system uses less chemicals for plant protection and mineral fertilizers but productivity is typically lower. The results of most Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies show that mineral fertilization is the process contributing most to the environmental impacts (Mohamend et al., 2014; Romero-Gamez et all., 2017), but irrigation also contributes significantly to impacts (Notarnicola et all., 2015) in the production of olive oil. The Mediterranean basin is the largest area characterized by olive cultivation, where irrigation is necessary and widespread. Metzidakis et al., 2008 has shown that intensive cultivation results with higher yields but also higher labour cost and generate much more waste because of higher use of chemicals. LCA is used to quantify different environmental impacts of the entire production system of the olive oil sector and also this method can specify the environmental hotspots in a production system (Avraamides and Fatta, 2008; Hanandeh and Gharaibeh, 2016; Notarnicola et al., 2015).