Farmers produce first extra virgin olive oil in Britain amid climate

Farmers in the middle of England's windy Fenlands have successfully hand-harvested what is believed to be the first extra virgin olive oil on British soil.

This as drought, heatwaves and wildfires have reduced yields in many traditional olive-producing regions across the Mediterranean, driving up demand and prices of the "liquid gold."

David Hoyles, whose family has farmed the Fens for some 200 years, thinks there is an opportunity to grow olives on the edge of where the trees will survive.

He hedged his bets to plant a range of olive varieties from France, Spain and Italy on 25 acres of land in Long Sutton, southern Lincolnshire, although some crops turned brown and withered after spells of harsh weather.

Hoyles says, "Some of our crops have been struggling to grow with the warmer and drier conditions, so we invested in three large reservoirs in the last eight years to try mitigate the dryness."

His confidence was boosted by the first harvest in November 2025.

After handpicking the olives and pressing them on site on the Lincolnshire farm, Hoyles and another grower in Essex submitted samples off to Italy for lab tests and got the news in April that their products met the standard for extra virgin olive oil.

Converting a shipping container into Britain's first commercial olive press, Hoyles explains the stirred olives would go into centrifuge, leaving just the oil, which is filtered and bottled, ready for consumers. The production process can take 40 minutes.

Hoyles states: "It's quite a fresh taste, a bit like freshly cut grass. It's also got quite a peppery aftertaste."

Hoyles says he is expecting the first blossoms of the year in his olive grove, with hopes that the second harvest will bring an even bigger yield.

Yet, some olive oil industry practitioners note that producers are under heavy strain and say expanding the country's fledgling olive oil industry is where the challenge is.

Climate expert Tom Lancaster warns obstacles like extreme weather, soil quality and topography remain. "All it will take is a cold winter and some really harsh frosts and that crop will be lost and all that investment will be lost. So at the moment our climate is unreliable for a lot of these more novel crops because the cost and risks of growing them commercially at scale are still too high."