`University of California Releases Manual on Growing Olives for Oil Production - Olive Oil Times
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University of California Releases Manual on Growing Olives for Oil Production

By Daniel Dawson
Sep. 16, 2024 13:34 UTC

The team behind the University of California Agricultural and Natural Resource’s (UCANR) newly pub­lished Olive Production Manual for Oil hopes the ref­er­ence book will help sup­port the state’s grow­ing olive oil sec­tor.

Over the past decade, the acreage ded­i­cated to olive oil pro­duc­tion has sur­passed table olive acreage across California, which is respon­si­ble for vir­tu­ally all North American olive oil pro­duc­tion.

However, UCANR’s only olive-related ref­er­ence books remained the orig­i­nal Olive Production Manual, pub­lished in 1953 and revised in 1994 and 2005, and the Organic Olive Production Manual, pub­lished in 2007.

See Also:Olive Oil for Dummies Seeks to Educate Consumers, Dispel Common Myths

“The Olive Production Manual was mostly for table olive grow­ers,” said Selina Wang, the book’s co-tech­ni­cal edi­tor and an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at the University of California-Davis depart­ment of food sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. ​“This is the first pro­duc­tion man­ual for oil olive grow­ers.”

“We wanted this book to be a straight­for­ward, prac­ti­cal and rel­e­vant man­ual for the olive grow­ers,” she added. ​“Some chap­ter writ­ers are aca­d­e­mics like myself, but we had indus­try pro­fes­sion­als who have been doing the hands-on work for decades to review them to ensure the infor­ma­tion is prac­ti­cal and easy to fol­low.”

Along with UC Davis Olive Center founder Dan Flynn and Louise Ferguson, Wang set out to cre­ate a step-by-step out­line of every­thing an olive grower needs to know about sit­ing, plant­ing, har­vest­ing and main­tain­ing an orchard.

The book includes an intro­duc­tion to the indus­try his­tory and California olive oil grades and stan­dards, fol­lowed by chap­ters that dis­cuss olive phys­i­ol­ogy, soil and nutri­ent man­age­ment, canopy main­te­nance, weed and pest iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and man­age­ment, includ­ing the olive fruit fly and olive psyl­lid, olive tree dis­eases and olive har­vest­ing.

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The technical editors said the book can help olive growers become more efficient and resilient.

While the book focuses mainly on the olive grove, there is also a chap­ter about milling the olives, stor­ing the olive oil and deal­ing with some of the olive milling byprod­ucts.

“Each chap­ter is writ­ten by some­one who has been study­ing that sub­ject for most of their career,” Wang said. For exam­ple, a lead­ing plant phys­i­ol­o­gist wrote the phys­i­ol­ogy chap­ter, and an ento­mol­o­gist wrote the pest iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and con­trol chap­ter.

“I think the book is strong and com­pre­hen­sive because one per­son did not write it,” Wang added. ​“It’s not pos­si­ble to be an expert on har­vest­ing, milling, grow­ing, pests and every­thing else.”

The book focuses on high-den­sity and super-high-den­sity olive groves, with chap­ters dis­cussing sit­ing, tree spac­ing, irri­ga­tion require­ments and appro­pri­ate vari­eties.

“For the site selec­tion and land prepa­ra­tion, we pro­vide infor­ma­tion about col­lect­ing and send­ing soil and water sam­ples for test­ing, includ­ing what to test for… to see what is defi­cient and then see if there’s a need for a sup­ple­ment,” Wang said.

While the man­ual does not explic­itly address cli­mate change or regen­er­a­tive agri­cul­tural prac­tices, it explains to olive grow­ers how to think about irri­ga­tion and water avail­abil­ity and how to min­i­mize phy­tosan­i­tary inputs.

“We wanted this man­ual to be for every grower, regard­less of the sizes and their farm­ing prac­tice,” Wang said.

Work on the 273-page book started dur­ing the Covid-19 pan­demic and took nearly four years to com­plete. Wang said one of the main chal­lenges was keep­ing the writ­ing con­cise. ​“We wanted to ensure this did not read like a text­book or a sci­en­tific man­u­script,” she said.

However, each chap­ter pro­vides exten­sive read­ing rec­om­men­da­tions for any­one curi­ous about any sub­ject.

The Olive Oil Commission of California funded the man­ual. As a result, the state-run non-profit will receive about 150 copies of the book to dis­trib­ute among its mem­bers, which include the coun­try’s largest olive farm­ers and olive oil pro­duc­ers.

Still, Wang said the com­mis­sion hopes to sell many more copies in California, the broader United States and inter­na­tion­ally. If there is demand for copies in other lan­guages, Wang antic­i­pates the pub­lisher would be will­ing to trans­late the book.

“Next spring, the three of us [Flynn, Sherman and Wang] will travel around California from the north to the south with some of the chap­ter writ­ers,” Wang said. ​“At each stop, we will dis­cuss the most rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion from the man­ual and focus on a spe­cific regional prob­lem.”

For exam­ple, Wang said in the more arid regions of California, the three tech­ni­cal edi­tors would dis­cuss irri­ga­tion and water man­age­ment. In the coastal areas, they will go into depth about mon­i­tor­ing and mit­i­gat­ing the impacts of the olive fruit fly.

The Olive Production Manual for Oil is avail­able for $90 (€82) on the UCANR cat­a­log.

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