Oregon Project Aims to Promote Olive Oil Sector

A new project launched by Oregon State University (OSU) aims to help spread olivi­cul­ture through­out California’s north­ern neigh­bor.

The pri­mary objec­tives of the Olea project will be to deter­mine the most effec­tive prop­a­ga­tion tech­niques for olives in Oregon; iden­tify which cul­ti­vars grow best in Oregon’s unique cli­mate; assess the best trans­plant­ing and up-pot­ting prac­tices for achiev­ing rapid orchard estab­lish­ment; and mak­ing all of this infor­ma­tion avail­able to the pub­lic in order to help bol­ster the fledg­ling indus­try.

Sitting between 45 and 46 degrees of lat­i­tude, Oregon is located a bit far­ther north of other, more tra­di­tional, olive grow­ing regions. However, grow­ers and offi­cials work­ing on the Olea project believe that com­mer­cial olive grow­ing can suc­ceed here.

While no offi­cial pro­duc­tion sta­tis­tics are cur­rently being kept – some­thing that Olea seeks to change – Paul Durant, the mas­ter miller at Durant Olive Mills, esti­mates that Oregon pro­duced about 5,000 liters of olive oil last year. Durant has a gen­eral ideal about this fig­ure since he runs the only com­mer­cial mill in the state.

Production has slowly grown since Oregonians first began grow­ing olives com­mer­cially about 15 years ago. While the sec­tor has not expe­ri­enced the same kind of steady growth that California has achieved in that time, the num­ber of acres of olive trees has crept up to about 100, all of which are located in the val­leys west of the Cascade Range.

“I think we’ve expe­ri­enced kind of incre­men­tal growth,” Durant told Olive Oil Times. ​“People have got­ten in and then they’ve got­ten out. Then other peo­ple have got­ten in.”

The incre­men­tal nature of this growth, and the over­all suc­cess of the olive grow­ers, has a lot to do with weather pat­terns, accord­ing to Javier Fernandez-Salvador, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor at OSU and lead inves­ti­ga­tor on the Olea project.

“What we’ve found here in Oregon is that our yield and pro­duc­tion depends a lot on the con­di­tions of the pre­vi­ous sea­son,” Fernandez-Salvador told Olive Oil Times. ​“If you look at the 2018 har­vest, we had a really mild win­ter and then we also had lower pre­cip­i­ta­tion, a drier spring and sum­mer, which is good for pol­li­na­tion. A lot of our grow­ers reported much higher yields than before.”

The pre­vi­ous few years have brought more mild win­ters, which has allowed some olive groves that were recently planted to go through a cou­ple of pro­duc­tion cycles.

“In Oregon, it’s not a mat­ter of hav­ing a hot and dry sum­mer,” Fernandez-Salvador said. ​“It’s about too much cold in the win­ter.”

When the first olive groves began pop­ping up in Oregon 15 years ago, many pro­duc­ers sim­ply imported olive trees from California, hop­ing to repli­cate the suc­cess olive grow­ers were expe­ri­enc­ing far­ther south.

“Unfortunately, that sys­tem does not work in Oregon,” Fernandez-Salvador said. ​“First of all because of our topog­ra­phy and sec­ond because of our cli­matic lim­i­ta­tions.”

Serious freeze events in 2008, 2010 and 2013 wiped out many orchards and led those who remained to rethink their strate­gies.

In many ways, the evo­lu­tion of the Oregonian olive oil sec­tor resem­bles what hap­pened with the Pinot Noir grape a quar­ter-cen­tury ago.

“Oregon was not a wine pro­duc­ing region 25 years ago and some grow­ers started bring­ing cul­ti­vars and try­ing them and then found out that Pinot Noir thrived here,” Fernandez-Salvador said.

Oregon is now quite famous for its Pinot Noir grapes, which are cold tol­er­ant enough to with­stand the freez­ing win­ters. However, in order to suc­ceed in grow­ing the Pinot Noir grape, pro­duc­ers first failed with many other vari­eties.

Bogdan Caceu, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Olive Growers of Oregon and an olive grower him­self at La Creole Orchards, told a local agri­cul­tural pub­li­ca­tion that he believes olive oil can repeat the story of Pinot Noir.

In order to be suc­cess­ful, Caceu said that grow­ers must find an olive cul­ti­var that is more cold-tol­er­ant than the ones grown in California, is char­ac­ter­ized by early bloom­ing and has excep­tional sen­so­r­ial qual­i­ties.

“If we check all those boxes, that’s the Pinot Noir of olives,” he said.

Fernandez-Salvador, how­ever, believes in a more nuanced approach than sim­ply find­ing the right cul­ti­var.

“Unfortunately for Oregon, cul­ti­vars by them­selves are not a sil­ver bul­let to be able to pro­duce com­mer­cially here because of the phys­i­ol­ogy of the crop,” he said.

“Unlike in grapes, which are very cold tol­er­ant, you just needed to find some­thing that thrives with our shorter ripen­ing and pro­duc­tion sea­son, but with olives the prob­lem is not the ripen­ing sea­son,” he added. ​“The main prob­lem is sur­viv­ing the win­ter dam­age and estab­lish­ing an orchard fast enough so that it is com­mer­cially viable.

However, some grow­ers have found suc­cess with sev­eral vari­eties that were imported from colder regions. Fernandez-Salvador said that vari­eties from the north of Italy and south of France had so far shown quite a bit of promise. OSU is cur­rently con­duct­ing field stud­ies to deter­mine which cul­ti­vars have the best chances of suc­cess in Oregon.

Durant, on the other hand, said that he has seen the most suc­cess with his three main Italian vari­eties.

“I am a big fan of Leccino, Frantoio and Picual,” he said. ​“They are prob­a­bly my top three and they have been pro­duc­ing a good amount of fruit, which is obvi­ously the key too. It’s one thing to sur­vive, but can you also get a decent amount of fruit out of them.”

Olive oil pro­duc­tion in Oregon is fre­quently a race against the clock. Olive trees tend to bloom in mid to late June and the ear­li­est that the har­vest can take place is in November, with olive grow­ers remain­ing ever-vig­i­lant of the prospect of the year’s first snow­fall.

However, the vig­i­lance and efforts of Oregonian pro­duc­ers often pay off in terms of qual­ity. Durant said that Oregonian olive oils tend to have a unique fla­vor and high polyphe­nol count. Fernandez-Salvador said that tests of var­i­ous olive oils done at the UC Davis Olive Center have con­firmed this.

“I don’t know if it’s the extended ripen­ing, we bloom really late com­pared with other cli­mates, but the oil is phe­nom­e­nally dis­tinc­tive,” Durant said.

The high-qual­ity end prod­uct, com­bined with strong demand for locally pro­duced goods in Oregon, means that olive grow­ing and oil pro­duc­ing can be quite prof­itable.

“Growers are look­ing at pro­duc­ing local mar­ket, high value prod­ucts,” Fernandez-Salvador said. ​“Some are even sell­ing 250 mil­li­liter bot­tles for $40.”

And more peo­ple are show­ing inter­est in join­ing the sec­tor as well. Fernandez-Salvador said that the state cur­rently has about 10 to 12 com­mer­cial grow­ers and about 15 to 20 smaller-scale grow­ers.

“It’s a small indus­try, but the other week we held a grower meet­ing [at the uni­ver­sity] and we had around 50 to 60 peo­ple,” he said.

Durant said that the Olea project should help the sec­tor grow faster than its pre­vi­ous incre­men­tal rate and looks for­ward to a big­ger and bet­ter Oregonian olive oil indus­try.

“I think it should grow faster. That’s my belief,” he said. ​“What OSU is doing is putting some sci­en­tific method behind the research. When you have that hap­pen­ing, we’re all going to ben­e­fit and I think peo­ple will start to become attracted to the tree as a com­mer­cially viable option.”

• Olea