Irrigating Olives with 15in per Acre

California Olive Ranch Going from2.5 Feet of Water Per Acre to15 Inches Per Acre

Olive trees are one of the oldest fruit trees in the world. (Yes, olives are a fruit). Scientists havetraced the DNA of olives back 6,000 years or more and archeologists have found olive pits inancient sites throughout the Mediterranean, which is still where most olives grow today.

In fact,one of the key varieties that California Olive Ranch grows is Koroneiki, an olive that is piquantand spicy, and has been growing in Greece for 3,000 years.

For much of their long history, olives have been harvested and milled using traditional methodsthat date back thousands of years. Olive plants mature into trees over several years and areharvested primarily by hand with people using rakes to pull the fruit off the trees. It's laborintensive and time-consuming. To make olive oil that was good and reasonably priced,

California Olive Ranch would have to adapt olive production to a very different method ofgrowing and harvesting, says Gregg Kelley, the company's CEO.

"It's what we call ‘super high density'. The first acreage was planted outside of Barcelona in1996," he says standing in one of the company's fields about 40 miles west of Chico, Calif. "Thistype of orchard has only been around 18 years anywhere in the world."

Look out across the orchard and you may be able to tell what's growing there. It certainlydoesn't look like trees, let alone olive trees, which look much like any other orchard crop with bigtrunks and boughs. Growing the "super high density" way means planting olives as hedges thatare trained through pruning to grow up a dozen or so feet high instead of branching out.

By growing olives in rows, like wine grapes, California Olive Ranch has taken most of thehuman labor out of the harvest. Instead of an army of people using rakes, enormous mechanicalharvesters shaped like a very tall upside-down "U" move through the fields at about a mile anhour. They ride over the top of the hedges and shake the olive trees, dramatically forcing thefruit off the plant. The olives drop down into a cache and then move up what might be called"olive escalators" that dump the fruit into giant gondola-like trucks that capture tons of olivesevery few hours.

"We looked at a lot of traditional hand-harvested crops and thought about how to take it to thenext level, how to mechanize it. It mimics the hand-raking process," says Brian Mori, agrower/field representative who was on the team that helped take what had been wine-grapeharvesters and made them work for olives. In the end, he says, "we had to build a tree to meetthe needs of the harvester."

While the trees look substantially different from traditional olive trees, they are still what headmiller Bob Singletary calls "an incredible piece of work."

"These trees are self-pollinating, they grow a specific olive and there's no cross-pollination. Wehave this unbelievable tree producing fruit for us," he says in a tone that doesn't border onreverence—it is reverent. "We have to take care of it."

While technology might get a bad rap in agriculture sometimes, at California Olive Ranch it'sdesigned in great part to do just what Singletary says they must: take care of the trees.

For the first eight years of operation, California Olive Ranch was run "almost as an experiment,"Kelley says. But when he was hired he brought the belief that technology, used well, couldchange how olive oil was produced in a place where labor is expensive and the arid, harshenvironment can be unforgiving.

"I can't escape the technology, maybe it's a character flaw," Kelley says of himself, since his firstcareer was working in Silicon Valley during the first Internet bubble in the late 1990s and early2000s. He was the typical start-up entrepreneur living a fast-paced life.

"I had accomplishedeverything I wanted to accomplish professionally," he remembers. But driving home one day hecaught sight of himself in the windows of a building on Van Ness Street. "I had all the fancy stuffyou'd want to have as a 20-something, fancy car, fancy clothes, eat in fancy restaurants, but Iwas miserable."

He wasn't happy with the way business worked—and still does—in much of the startup world.

"Itwas built around the perception of value, selling that perception of value and making money offthat perception," he says. "I remember to this day seeing my reflection and thinking, ‘You looklike an absolute idiot.'"

The next day, Kelley bought a Jeep Wrangler and started wearing jeans to work. He jokes thathe was going through a midlife crisis at the age of 29. He ended up helping to sell off thecompany where he was working and merging it with another company. Then he bought a one-way ticket to Heathrow Airport and traveled for two years.

When he returned, he ended up in Chico, where his brother was living. "I had no idea what Iwould do," he says, but he loved that people said hello to him on the streets of the small townsurrounded by farmland.

He came across California Olive Ranch on a farm visit. At the time, it was a single ranch with asingle mill. But his interest was piqued by the way the company wanted to grow olives. "Ithelped make the connection between my former life in technology and that grounded life I waslooking for," he says.

He brought that business acumen to California Olive Ranch, traveling to places where they havebeen growing olives for millennia, like the Italian city of Puglia and Andalusia in Spain, to do research andlearn the business.

He and his team would ask, "Why do you prune this way, why do you blend that way? And all too often the answer was ‘it's just the way we do it,'" he says. "But we needed the answer. Sowe took the path of collecting information on everything we do."

The company knows every root and nursery stock that is planted in its fields, as well as thefields of farmers who supply to California Olive Ranch. There are weather stations in everysingle orchard. There are moisture probes in every field so they know exactly how muchmoisture is taken up through the roots. They track every load from every field to the mill andthen the oil is tracked into the bottle.

That obsession with data has led to big changes in the way the company treats its trees and theland they grow on. This is big data, used wisely, that can help change the phrase "it's alwayswhat we've done" to "the data tells me to do this."

For instance, California Olive Ranch used to irrigate its fields with 2.5 feet of water per acre butrealized through data that it was watering too much. Now growers irrigate at 15 inches per acre.

"We also realized we were giving too much fertilizer to the trees. We used to put too muchnitrogen on them, treating them like an almond or walnut tree. We've reduced that to almostnothing and last year we didn't use fertilizer," Kelley says.

In the end what's most important is what happens in the 40 to 45 days of harvest that runsthrough much of September and October. Then it's up to the humans, the millers and qualitycontrol scientists, who will taste almost every oil milled out of the hundreds of truckloads that gofrom field to mill during harvest.

"We have 60 truckloads with 60,000 pounds of fruit a piece coming in every 24 hours," saysSingletary, who estimates he consumes about a quart a day during the harvest. "I taste the oiltwelve to sixteen hours a day."

Source: TechCrunch

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