Start of the 2025 Processing Tomato Campaign in Northern Italy

The 2025 processing tomato campaign has kicked off in Northern Italy with the harvesting and delivery to processing plants of “pomodorino” produce and the first quantities of the early “tondo” variety. The first processing plant was started on Sunday, July 13, followed by others in the following days to reach full capacity in the week of July 21. A decidedly early start that is a prelude to a harvesting and processing campaign long enough to process the high quantities of tomatoes put into the field in the reference area of the Interprofessional Organization of Tomato for Industry of Northern Italy.

In fact, the areas cultivated with tomatoes in the Northern basin, entirely under integrated or organic production, are significantly higher than in previous years. Those cultivated in compliance with the organic specification represent 9.1 percent of the total, with a slight decrease in percentage terms that nevertheless consolidates the amount of hectares dedicated to organic in recent years.

The increase in the area planted to tomatoes in the current year finds ample justification in the demand for raw material coming from a robust industrial system, geared to the production of high value-added finished products largely destined for export, which wants to react to the production declines of the last two years caused by adverse weather trends that have jeopardized its ability to meet the demand for products packaged with Italian quality and branded tomatoes from the domestic and foreign markets.

The monitoring conducted by the IO regarding the areas transplanted week by week indicates that the transplanting phase, despite some difficulties related to intermittent rains in April that made it difficult to prepare the land and then, in several areas, to access the fields of agricultural vehicles used in transplanting, had an all in all orderly and linear trend. This homogeneous temporal distribution of the seedling planting phase, the merit of an organized and professional agricultural part, bodes well for an equally orderly distribution of the harvesting phase and subsequent processing phase with optimal plant utilization.

“The figure of areas under processing tomatoes also up this year in Northern Italy,” comments Giuseppe Romanini, president of the IO Tomato Processing Organization Northern Italy, “confirms a growing tendency of farmers in the North to choose to invest in processing tomatoes over other crops, and to this trend I believe the robustness of the supply chain has contributed, with producer organizations and processors choosing to work in synergy with each other, giving body, with the Interprofessional Organization, to a cooperative and integrated model that constitutes a tangible advantage in terms of competitiveness and allows the problems that arise each year to be tackled together.”

And these days the concern in several areas is the availability of water for irrigation. Water requirements will peak in the coming days, growing, in the absence of rain, until the end of August. The effects of climate change mean that high rainfall years alternate with drought years. Last 2024 saw a record number of millimeters of rain fall, however, only in areas equipped with reservoirs is there water available today for irrigating crops in the lowlands. Those without them are already in trouble because of the ban on deriving from surface water to protect the DMV (minimum vital runoff).

The breakdown of actual areas in the provinces of the Northern Italian basin sees Piacenza always in the lead, with 10,543 hectares under tomatoes. This is followed by Ferrara with 8,132 hectares; Parma with 4,299; and Mantua with 4,123. The other provinces follow with smaller values.

Looking at organic, however, Ferrara is the province with the most hectares: 2,705; followed by Ravenna with 329 hectares and Verona with 244.

The breakdown by region sees Emilia-Romagna as the one with the most hectares cultivated with tomatoes (64 percent of the total), followed by Lombardy (21 percent), Piedmont (9 percent) and Veneto (6 percent).

Source: OI Pomodoro Nord Italia