"We lost almost 85% of the production of green skin avocados" - Portal of Greek and Cypriot fruit and vegetable producers

Weather conditions have made avocado cultivation in Greece challenging this year, causing major losses in production, says Apostolis Mylonakis, of Greek fresh produce exporter Edem Fruits: “The cultivation period has been kind of hard for the upcoming avocado season, due to unstable weather. During the flowering of the avocado trees, especially of the green skin avocados, we had really big changes in weather. During the flowering, we had low temperature and heavy rains. That affected a lot of the bees that we use for natural pollination of the plants.”

There is a difference in terms of production depending on the variety, Mylonakis explains. “We lost almost 85% of the production of green skin avocados. I can’t remember experiencing such a disaster before. But in my opinion, as the weather is becoming more unstable every year we have to know that these situations can happen more often. For Hass avocados, we’re expecting a growth of about 40% compared to last season, thanks to young trees getting into production. Every year we expect a serious increase, due to new plantations that we have invested in.”

Water availability is a hot topic all over Europe, but for Edem it’s not as much as an issue according to Mylonakis: “As a producer group and family company, we are not affected by the water situation, because we already almost exclusively use rainwater, that we store it in tanks during the rainy months. Also, after a lot of research, we’ve opted to cultivate all of our avocados in areas that have the highest humidity level and are also close to the famous white mountains, wich are higher than 2400m. This means there’s plenty of water available in our area.”

Weather has caused the biggest challenges, both in terms of temperature as well as rainfall, Mylonakis states. “The low temperature and the heavy raindrops during the flowering days were catastrophic for green skin avocados like Fuerte and Bacon avocados. But thankfully, this didn’t affect the Hass avocados that are awaiting a good season. Also, during the month of July, we had some days of really high heat, but we didn’t have really big problems like other years.”

Edem’s avocados are exported to several European markets: “Our main markets for the avocados are Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Poland, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic. We want to expand more in Germany and France, and also we’d like to start working with Romania,” Mylonakis concludes.

For more information:
Apostolis Mylonakis
Edem Fruits
Tel: +30 698 086 3016
info@edem-fruits.gr
www.edem-fruits.gr