Cactus Pear Is a Crop with Potential in Italy’s Parched South and Beyond

Prickly pear cactus plantation is seen in Tepeteopan, state of Puebla, Mexico January 16, 2020. Picture taken January 16, 2020. (Reuters)
Prickly pear cactus plantation is seen in Tepeteopan, state of Puebla, Mexico January 16, 2020. Picture taken January 16, 2020. (Reuters)
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Cactus Pear Is a Crop with Potential in Italy’s Parched South and Beyond

Prickly pear cactus plantation is seen in Tepeteopan, state of Puebla, Mexico January 16, 2020. Picture taken January 16, 2020. (Reuters)
Prickly pear cactus plantation is seen in Tepeteopan, state of Puebla, Mexico January 16, 2020. Picture taken January 16, 2020. (Reuters)

Global warming, drought and plant disease pose a growing threat to agriculture in Italy's arid south, but a startup founded by a former telecoms manager believes it has found a solution: Opuntia Ficus, better known as the cactus pear.

Andrea Ortenzi saw the plant's potential 20 years ago when working for Telecom Italia in Brazil, where it is widely used as animal feed. On returning to Italy he began looking at ways to turn his intuition into a business opportunity.

He and four friends founded their company, called Wakonda, in 2021, and began buying land to plant the crop in the southern Puglia region where the traditionally dominant olive trees had been ravaged by an insect-borne disease called Xylella.

The damage from the plant disease has been compounded by recurring droughts and extreme weather in the last few years all over Italy's southern mainland and islands, hitting crops from grapes to citrus fruits.

Ortenzi is convinced the hardy and versatile cactus pear, otherwise called the prickly pear or, in Italy, the Indian fig, can be a highly profitable solution yielding a raft of products such as soft drinks, flour, animal feed and biofuel.

The Italian businessman is far from alone in seeing the potential of the plant, whose cultivation is expanding in hot and dry regions around the world.

"As an industry, cactus pear production is growing rather quickly, especially for fodder use and as a source of biofuel," said Makiko Taguchi, agricultural officer at the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization headquartered in Rome.

MULTIPLE USES

The cactus produces a tasty fruit eaten in much of Latin America and the Mediterranean, while in Mexico the flat green pads that form the arms of the cactus, are used in cooking.

In Tunisia, where it covers around 12% of cultivated land, second only to olive trees, the cactus pear is a major source of income for thousands, particularly women who harvest and sell the fruit.

In Brazil, which has the world's largest production, it is mainly cultivated in the north-east for fodder, while Peru and Chile use it to extract a red dye known as Cochineal, used in food and cosmetic production.

Sportswear group Adidas and carmaker Toyota have recently shown interest in using the cactus to produce plant-based leather sourced mainly from Mexico.

The cactus pear is not yet included in the FAO's agricultural output statistics, but Taguchi cited the rapid expansion of CactusNet, a contact network of cactus researchers and businesses worldwide which she coordinates.

The FAO launched the group online in 2015 with 69 members. It now has 933 members in 82 countries. The plant, native to desert areas of south and north America, thrives in the increasingly arid conditions of Italy's south, and needs ten times less water than maize, a comparable crop whose byproducts also include animal feed and methane.

So far Wakonda, an American Indian word meaning nature's omnipresent creative force, has planted just 10 hectares of cactus with 40,000 plants per hectare, but Ortenzi plans to plant 300 hectares by the end of 2025, and he is thinking big.

Of the roughly 100,000 hectares of olive trees destroyed by Xylella in southern Puglia, only 30,000 will be replanted in the same way, he told Reuters in an interview.

"Potentially 70,000 could be planted with prickly pears," he said.

In the long run the possibilities could be even greater, Ortenzi said, considering more than a million hectares of arable land have been abandoned in Italy in recent decades as climate change has made it more difficult to produce traditional crops.

WAKONDA'S MODEL

Wakonda's business model discards the fruit and focuses instead on the prickly pads, which are pressed to yield a juice used for a highly nutritious, low-calorie energy drink. The dried out pads are then processed to produce a light flour for the food industry or a high-protein animal feed.

Wakonda's circular, ecological production system also includes "biodigester" tanks in which the waste from the output cycle is transformed into methane gas used as a bio-fuel either on site or sold.

The company, which now has 37 shareholders, is in contact with mayors, firms and universities to develop its products.

Under Ortenzi's business plan, rather than buying up land to plant the cactus, Wakonda aims to persuade farmers of its potential and then license out to them, in return for royalties, all the equipment and know-how required to exploit it.

"The land remains yours, you convert it to prickly pears and I guarantee to buy all your output for at least 15 years," Ortenzi said.



Pizza Delivery Monitor Alerts to Secret Israel Attack

The Pentagon is seen from the US Army Golden Knights parachute team plane ahead of their performance during the Twilight Tattoo ceremony as part of the Army’s 250th Birthday Festival in Washington, D.C., after taking off from Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia, US, June 11, 2025. (Reuters)
The Pentagon is seen from the US Army Golden Knights parachute team plane ahead of their performance during the Twilight Tattoo ceremony as part of the Army’s 250th Birthday Festival in Washington, D.C., after taking off from Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia, US, June 11, 2025. (Reuters)
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Pizza Delivery Monitor Alerts to Secret Israel Attack

The Pentagon is seen from the US Army Golden Knights parachute team plane ahead of their performance during the Twilight Tattoo ceremony as part of the Army’s 250th Birthday Festival in Washington, D.C., after taking off from Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia, US, June 11, 2025. (Reuters)
The Pentagon is seen from the US Army Golden Knights parachute team plane ahead of their performance during the Twilight Tattoo ceremony as part of the Army’s 250th Birthday Festival in Washington, D.C., after taking off from Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia, US, June 11, 2025. (Reuters)

The timing of Israel's plan to attack Iran was top secret. But Washington pizza delivery trackers guessed something was up before the first bombs fell.

About an hour before Iranian state TV first reported loud explosions in Tehran, pizza orders around the Pentagon went through the roof, according to a viral X account claiming to offer "hot intel" on "late-night activity spikes" at the US military headquarters.

"As of 6:59 pm ET nearly all pizza establishments nearby the Pentagon have experienced a HUGE surge in activity," the account "Pentagon Pizza Report" posted on Thursday.

While far from scientific, the Pentagon pizza theory "is not something the internet just made up," The Takeout, an online site covering restaurants and food trends, noted earlier this year.

Pentagon-adjacent pizza joints also got much busier than usual during Israel's 2024 missile strike on Iran, it said, as there are "a multitude of fast-food restaurants in the Pentagon complex, but no pizza places."

Pizza deliveries to the Pentagon reportedly doubled right before the US invasion of Panama in December 1989 and surged again before Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

President Donald Trump told The Wall Street Journal he was fully aware in advance of the bombing campaign, which Israel says is needed to end Iran's nuclear program. "We know what's going on."

For the rest of Americans, pepperoni pie activity was not the only way to tell something was about to happen.

Washington had already announced it was moving some diplomats and their families out of the Middle East on Wednesday.

And close to an hour before Israel unleashed its firepower on Iran, the US ambassador in Jerusalem, Mike Huckabee, sent out a rather revealing X post: "At our embassy in Jerusalem and closely monitoring the situation. We will remain here all night. 'Pray for the peace of Jerusalem!'"