Agostino Petroni grew up surrounded by olive trees in his native Puglia, where the gnarled and twisted trunks grow into massive monuments over thousands of years. He’s seen the annual harvest his whole life, when windburned farmers congregate at their neighborhood cafes to talk about yields, percentages, and quality with the same rapt attention that appraiser give when assessing a rare diamond. In the past five years however, voices have become muted, and hands that once combed trees for emerald fruits now wring with anxiety. The devastation that xylella fastidiosa, the bacteria responsible for Olive Quick Decline Syndrome (OQDS), has caused is almost beyond description. The word ‘heartbreaking’ is often overused, but Petroni’s is palpable when he describes the moment that the gravity of the problem set in. An 85 year old man who had worked the land of the nobili for more than fifty years had finally saved enough money to buy a few hectares of olive grove to harvest oil for his family. What had been a dream a lifetime in the making quickly turned tragic as the farmer watched all of his trees wither from the xylella coursing through it. The old man, a man who had likely endured decades of labor and fatigue, looked at his barren grove and cried.
