Lecciana, a New Low-Vigour Olive Cultivar Suitable for Super High Density Orchards and for Nutraceutical EVOO Production

Salvatore Camposeo,Cinzia Montemurro,Gaetano Alessandro Vivaldi,Marisa Cunill Canal,Valentina Fanelli

doi:10.3390/agronomy11112154

Salvatore Camposeo, Cinzia Montemurro + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy11112154

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Abstract

Cultivar is the key factor for sustainability of the olive super high density planting system (SHD). ‘Lecciana’ is a new olive cultivar for oil production obtained in 1998 by a controlled cross between cv. Arbosana (♀) and cv. Leccino (♂) in a breeding program as part of an international research agreement between Agromillora Iberia S.L.U. and University of Bari. ‘Lecciana’ is the first olive cultivar of Italian descent suitable for SHD, featuring all the vegetative and productive traits required for efficient, sustainable olive growing intensification. Thanks to low vigor, early bearing (3rd year after planting), high yield efficiency (about 0.5 kg of fruits cm−2 of trunk section area) and good fruit size (3.5 g), ‘Lecciana’ could be planted with tree densities over 1,200 trees per hectare for an efficient continuous mechanical harvesting. High frost resistance, very low pistil abortion (3%), high fruit set (3%), oil content (over 19% fw) and, above all, good unsaturated fatty acids profile, polyphenols content (over 450 mg kg−1) and fruitiness median are the main distinctive characters of this new cultivar. The oils of ‘Lecciana’ fall into the category ‘nutraceutical EVOOs’ which can benefit from the specific functional health claim.

Highlights

IntroductionTraditional olive orchards are increasingly devoted to landscape safeguarding and cultural heritage enhancement [1,2], but they have lost in general their economic sustainability [3,4,5]
Among the well-established simple sequence repeats (SSR) set used for genetic fingerprint and parentage analysis [45,46] we selected two molecular markers with simple profile and easy to follow
‘Lecciana’ oils fall into the category ‘nutraceutical extra virgin olive oils (EVOOs)’

Summary

Introduction

Traditional olive orchards are increasingly devoted to landscape safeguarding and cultural heritage enhancement [1,2], but they have lost in general their economic sustainability [3,4,5]. In order to face the increasing production costs and the scarcity of manual labor, 25 years ago olive growing moved to super high density planting systems (SHD), characterized by hedgerow tree canopies suitable for continuous mechanical harvesting by straddle machines. More than 400,000 ha of SHD olive orchards are scattered all over the world, half in Spain where these new systems were born [6]. Intensification of olive planting systems represents a very interesting approach to enhance olive orchard environmental sustainability, reducing water footprint and other agronomical inputs [7,8,9]

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