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European pear growing: a strategic crop facing climate, yield and new technical challenges
Pear growing remains a high-value sector for European agriculture. According to Eurostat, in 2024 the European Union produced around 1.9 million tons of pears, with Italy ranking as the leading producer and accounting for 24% of total EU production. This important figure confirms the relevance of Italian pear growing, but it must be read within an increasingly complex context.
In recent years, the sector had to deal with shrinking cultivated areas, unstable yields, rising costs, plant diseases, extreme weather events and growing difficulties in crop forecasting. At Interpera 2026, the international event dedicated to pears, one message emerged clearly: the crop needs to be managed with increasingly precise agronomic tools, capable of supporting productivity, fruit quality and farm profitability.
Early European trends for the 2026/27 season point to a mixed outlook: Belgium, France and Spain are expecting lower production, while Portugal is forecasting an increase. In Italy, pears remain an iconic crop, particularly in the most suitable production areas in the North, but orchards are increasingly exposed to the combined effects of water stress, high temperatures, late frosts, hailstorms, brown spot, brown marmorated stink bug and tree decline.
In this context, water management is no longer just a supporting practice: it has become one of the key technical levers for making pear orchards more efficient, stable and resilient.
Pear trees and water requirements: why irrigation affects yield, fruit size and next year’s buds
The common pear, Pyrus communis L., is a tree species belonging to the Rosaceae family, grown both for fresh consumption and processing. It is a vigorous plant with an upright growth habit and a biological cycle that makes irrigation management particularly delicate.
During spring and summer, the pear tree does not only grow and produce fruit, it also starts the processes of bud induction and differentiation that will determine the following year’s crop. This means that water stress does not only affect the size or quality of the fruit being harvested, but can also influence the productive potential of the next season.
Correct water supply is therefore essential during the most sensitive stages: vegetative growth, fruit set, fruit enlargement, ripening and flower bud development. Uneven water availability can lead to inconsistent fruit size, lower marketable quality, reduced shelf life and greater physiological stress for the plant.
At the same time, pear trees are sensitive to waterlogging. For this reason, effective irrigation does not mean simply increasing the volumes applied, but delivering water with precision and uniformity, in line with soil type, climate, rootstock, variety, training system and planting density.
Drip irrigation for pear trees: localized water control along the row
In modern pear orchards, often characterized by intensive planting systems, long rows and higher tree densities, drip irrigation is particularly suitable because it delivers water directly to the root zone.
Localized application creates a continuous wetted strip along the row. This is useful both during the early establishment of young trees and in later years, when the root system needs to develop evenly and support consistent production.
Compared with less controlled irrigation methods, drip irrigation makes it easier to manage irrigation scheduling, reduce evaporation losses, limit waste and improve nutrient distribution. The benefit is not only water-related: good application uniformity helps maintain more even vegetative and productive development throughout the orchard.
However, system design must take soil texture into careful account. In lighter soils, closer emitter spacing may be required to ensure continuity in the wetted strip. In heavier clay soils, emitters placed too close together, or excessively long irrigation cycles, may encourage waterlogging, root asphyxia and conditions that favor diseases such as Phytophthora spp., Armillaria mellea and Rosellinia necatrix.
Driplines for intensive pear orchards: uniformity on long rows and complex terrain
For pear irrigation, Irritec offers solutions designed to increase system precision and uniformity, even under variable agronomic and topographic conditions.
In modern orchard systems, conventional driplines, sometimes referred to as heavy-wall driplines, with reduced emitter spacing can be laid on the ground along the row or attached to the trellis wire. This configuration supports orchard development through regular water distribution and helps keep the root system well supplied along the entire row.
Where orchards have very long rows, slopes or pressure variations, Irritec offers Multibar C® and Multibar F® pressure-compensating driplines, designed to maintain a constant flow rate across a wide pressure range. This is particularly important in orchards where uneven water distribution can lead to differences in vigor, fruit size and ripening across different areas of the plot.
The aim is to ensure that every tree receives the correct amount of water, regardless of its position along the row or the morphology of the land.
Subsurface drip irrigation for pear trees with Rootguard®: water and nutrients directly in the root zone
Subsurface drip irrigation is becoming an increasingly interesting solution in fruit growing, especially when the goal is to improve water efficiency and reduce surface losses.
In some experimental trials on pear trees, subsurface drip irrigation increased water use efficiency by 34.39–35.35% compared with surface drip irrigation. The study, published in Agricultural Water Management in 2021, identified double-line subsurface drip irrigation with a minimum soil moisture threshold of 60% of field capacity as the most effective configuration for pear orchards.
The same research also showed that, when considering only the soil moisture threshold, management at 70% of field capacity increased water use efficiency by 13.04% compared with 80% and by 7.56–12.21% compared with 60%. However, the 60% threshold improved quality parameters such as soluble solids and titratable acidity.
For this application, Irritec offers Multibar C® Rootguard® dripline, designed to limit root intrusion problems in buried driplines. This allows the system to operate more reliably over time, delivering water and nutrients where they are needed while reducing evaporation losses.
Correct management of irrigation timing and duration also helps limit deep percolation and the leaching of dissolved salts, improving the overall efficiency of the system.
Fertigation in pear orchards: more precise nutrition throughout the crop cycle
Drip irrigation also makes it possible to integrate fertigation effectively, distributing nutrients gradually and in proportion to the crop’s needs. For pear orchards, this means being able to intervene more precisely at different stages of the vegetative and productive cycle, avoiding concentrated and inefficient applications.
Irritec offers several solutions depending on the level of automation required by the farm. Venturi injectors provide a simple solution for introducing fertilizer into the irrigation system. The Ferticlick® bypass system enables proportional or volumetric fertigation with one fertilizer, while DosaBox® Junior Advanced allows automatic dosing of up to three fertilizers plus one acid, providing more advanced and accurate management.
Fertigation therefore becomes a tool for improving not only nutrient efficiency, but also the productive uniformity of the entire plot.
Designing pear irrigation systems to make every drop count
In a demanding crop such as pear, irrigation must be designed as an integral part of the agronomic strategy. The challenge is not simply to distribute water, but to do so as uniformly, accurately and sustainably as possible.
From the choice of dripline to emitter spacing, from pressure management to fertigation, every element contributes to the final quality of the orchard. Irritec solutions for drip irrigation and subsurface drip irrigation in pear orchards are designed with this goal in mind: to maximize the uniform distribution of water and nutrients, adapting to the size, topography and specific requirements of each system.
Because in pear growing, today more than ever, irrigation efficiency is not only a response to water scarcity, it is a technical condition for supporting fruit quality, productivity and the future of the crop.
