Terre dell’Etruria: 75 Years of Agricultural Cooperation Serving Tuscany

Terre dell’Etruria, an Agricultural Cooperative Society of Producers with over 5,500 members, represents the most important entrepreneurial reality in Tuscan agriculture. Headquartered in Castagneto Carducci (LI), the Cooperative operates across the entire agri-food chain with the goal of guiding its member farms in agronomic decisions and enhancing the Tuscan productions of its associates.

The olive-growing sector is one of the Cooperative’s strategic areas, supported by six operational mills located in Donoratico and Vignale (LI), Riparbella (PI), Vinci (FI), Montepulciano (SI), and Montiano (GR). This network ensures comprehensive coverage of the regional territory while maintaining high-quality standards. The numbers speak for themselves:

• 180,000 quintals of olives milled

• 4,700 hectares of olive groves

• 1,300 contributing members

In 2025, Terre dell’Etruria celebrated 75 years of cooperative history, which began on April 14, 1950, in Donoratico with the founding of the Milk Producers’ Cooperative. Over the decades, through mergers and shared growth paths, the Cooperative evolved into the current Terre dell’Etruria, a benchmark for Tuscan agriculture.

This journey has been marked by profound economic and social changes, which the cooperative model has been able to navigate by strengthening services, production sectors, and attention to sustainability. Today, Terre dell’Etruria operates in the provinces of Livorno, Pisa, Grosseto, Siena, Florence, and Pistoia, keeping its roots alive while looking to the future with a solid and shared vision.

The 75th-anniversary celebrations include initiatives dedicated to memory and cooperative identity, such as the expansion of the IRTA Leonardo iconographic exhibition and the publication of the volume “Terre dell’Etruria: History and Memory of a Tuscan Agricultural Cooperative”, presented as part of the 2025 institutional activities.

Through its olive oil and events designed to showcase the quality of its products to operators and enthusiasts alike, Terre dell’Etruria will participate in SOL Expo 2026.

"The 2025-2026 olive harvest," explains Giulio Fontana, head of Terre dell’Etruria’s olive-growing sector, *"was, as expected, a ‘reduction’ year compared to the previous one. Nevertheless, we managed to achieve satisfactory yields and olive oil of the highest quality.

Within our mills, olives were processed very quickly, ensuring oils with excellent organoleptic and taste characteristics. Almost all the olives processed were suitable for certification, allowing us to guarantee a top-quality Tuscan IGP Olive Oil production.

Thanks to our network of six mills, we monitor a vast territory extending from the Tuscan coast to the hills of Montalbano and Montepulciano, enabling a detailed analysis of production differences across a significant portion of regional olive-growing.

We also observed that areas closer to the coast, where more specialized processing facilities have been implemented, experienced a much smaller decrease in production compared to the drops recorded in the inland areas."*

The opportunity to taste Terre dell’Etruria olive oil and explore all scheduled events will be from March 1 to 3 at SOL Expo.