As Citrus Struggles, Some Olive Growers Take Root in Florida

On a small, 35-acre island in Groveland, Florida, Keith Keogh plans to grow olives where cit­rus trees once dom­i­nated the land­scape.

“We’ll start by grow­ing table olives at first,” Keogh, a for­mer cor­po­rate chef at Disney and Red Lobster, told Olive Oil Times. ​“Then you’ll have ones that aren’t of the qual­ity and appear­ance of table olives that will go to olive oil and we’ll do a sin­gles press on those olives.”

Depending on the qual­ity of those olives, the olive oil will then either be put into jars or go towards use in cos­met­ics. ​“We don’t want to put our stamp on any­thing that isn’t of very high qual­ity,” Keogh said.

Growing olives in Florida is not new. The Spanish first intro­duced olive trees to the state in the 1700s and, accord­ing to the Florida Farm Bureau, there are now more than 400 acres of olive trees in the Sunshine State, rang­ing from com­mer­cial grow­ers with more than 20 acres to back­yard hob­by­ists.

Keogh’s endeavor serves as a model to find out how olive trees might play out in Florida’s agri­cul­tural future. Before he can plant his olive trees on Hunt Island, Keogh is clear­ing out the old and dying cit­rus trees, many of which have been rav­aged by a dis­ease known as cit­rus green­ing.

Citrus green­ing is an insect-borne dis­ease that has been dis­rupt­ing the indus­try in Florida since it emerged in the mid-2000s.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, cit­rus pro­duc­tion has declined by more than 75 per­cent in Florida over the past two decades; a stark decrease for the state that is almost syn­ony­mous with orange juice.

“There’s a need to have another crop,” Keogh said. ​“When you really look at North Africa and other parts of the Mediterranean where olives are grown, it is a sandy and high lyme type of soil and the island’s soil kind of reminds me of that.”

Keogh is not alone in believ­ing that olives have the poten­tial to grow well in Florida. Several researchers within the University of Florida sys­tem have spent the last half-decade look­ing into this ques­tion and exper­i­ment­ing as well.

“Thus far, olives have been rel­a­tively pest free, and appear to be a sus­tain­able crop for this region,” Peter Andersen, from the University of Florida, North Florida Research and Education Center, said.

In 2006, the uni­ver­sity planted five dif­fer­ent types of olive vari­etals: Arbequina, Arbosana, Koroneiki, Manzanillo and Mission.

“A very small crop was noted for Arbequina and Koreneiki dur­ing 2015,” Andersen said. ​“The first sub­stan­tial yield occurred for Arbequina dur­ing 2016, with 38 per­cent of a full crop. Koroneiki and Arbosana had a very small crop, with 12 per­cent and three per­cent of a full crop, respec­tively, and Manzanillo and Mission pro­duced no crop.”

Similar research con­ducted at the University of Florida at Gainesville largely sup­ported Andersen’s find­ings. A 2015 report described Florida’s sandy soils as a suit­able loca­tion for grow­ing olive trees.

“Olives may be estab­lished in many areas of Florida in well-drained soils,” the report said.

On his sandy-soiled island, Keogh plans on grow­ing mostly Arbequina olives. He will also exper­i­ment with Manzanilla and Mission but in much smaller quan­ti­ties.

Florida is not the ideal cli­mate for grow­ing olives. The tem­per­a­ture rarely gets cold enough for long enough to allow the trees to become dor­mant, which then allows them to pro­duce fruit. However, Keogh said for prob­lems such this one, olive grow­ers will have to be inno­v­a­tive.

“It’s a mat­ter of just fig­ur­ing out what it takes to get the best qual­ity,” he said. ​“They will not be a copy or imi­ta­tion of what’s already there because this is a dif­fer­ent place and a dif­fer­ent cli­mate, a dif­fer­ent soil makeup. ”

To sup­port his argu­ment, he points to the fledg­ling Florida wine indus­try, which has come up with their own inno­v­a­tive way to get their vines to become dor­mant.

“When you look at some of these winer­ies that are grow­ing great grapes, they have to have the 60 to 80 day freez­ing period to become dor­mant and you don’t get that in Florida,” he said. ​“They come up with dif­fer­ent ways, such as inject­ing liq­uid CO2 into the ground and cre­at­ing dor­mancy that way, which makes sure those great grapes come out.”

However, get­ting the olives to grow is just half of the bat­tle. Making them eco­nom­i­cally viable for both the farm­ers and the state will prove to be much more chal­leng­ing. Nowhere is this bet­ter illus­trated than on the Florida Department of Agriculture’s web­site, which is dom­i­nated by cit­rus.

Painstakingly detailed reports each year show how many oranges, grape­fruits and tan­ger­ines are being grown, har­vested and sold. There are even tables show­ing exact quan­ti­ties of exports to more than a dozen dif­fer­ent coun­tries from at least five Floridian ports over the past decade.

The web­site does not con­tain nor does it link to any sta­tis­tics about olive grow­ing or pro­duc­tion.

“Right now we are still in the research stage in Florida,” Michael Garcia, pres­i­dent of the Florida Olive Council, told the Orlando Sentinel. ​“You can grow olives here, just not enough yet to be a big indus­try.”

Garcia did not respond to sev­eral requests for com­ment on this arti­cle but told the indus­try trade pub­li­ca­tion, My Farm Life, that the Florida Olive Council is exper­i­ment­ing both with tra­di­tional cul­ti­va­tion meth­ods as well as super-inten­sive farm­ing. He said that pre­lim­i­nary results are so far promis­ing, but it will take more time to see which method will work best going for­ward.

“We can make olive oil,” Garcia said. ​“It’s just a ques­tion of under­stand­ing whether it’s going to be small farms with high-qual­ity olives or large-den­sity.”

Olive oil pro­duc­ers in south and cen­tral Florida usu­ally pro­duce about a few hun­dred gal­lons of oil each year, which is mostly sold directly to con­sumers. Garcia told the Palm Beach Post that the state’s pro­duc­ers would have to wait and see how quickly this mod­est total could grow into some­thing larger.

“We have to see if it works,” he said. ​“We do not know year-over-year if you can get olives to bloom and set fruit in suf­fi­cient quan­ti­ties to be able to make money on it. If you make olive oil, you can sell it, there’s no prob­lem. The ques­tion is, can you make enough to make a profit at it?”

Keogh echoes this con­cern. He said that many farm­ers in Lake County have given up on farm­ing and sold their land for devel­op­ment. An alter­na­tive that they did not nec­es­sar­ily like, but saw as most eco­nom­i­cally viable.

“The eco­nomic via­bil­ity is, of course, another ques­tions,” he said. ​“A lot of these orange grove own­ers have lost a lot of their groves to dis­ease and are find­ing that maybe sell­ing the land for hous­ing or apart­ments is more eco­nomic for them.”

“But I tell you,” he added. ​“We can’t sup­port a state full fo asphalt and con­crete, we need to pre­serve some of these beau­ti­ful sugar sand hills that are out here.”

Richard Williams runs Florida Olive Systems, which pro­vides cut­tings for and advises numer­ous olive grow­ers around the state, includ­ing Keogh. Williams said that olive grow­ers and trade groups should apply some of the inno­va­tion they use for grow­ing olives into find­ing new prod­ucts for which to use olives.

“Florida’s unique geo­graph­i­cal grow­ing con­di­tions and its impact on the trees’ over­all phe­no­lic com­pound pro­duc­tion is val­i­dat­ing my ini­tial hypoth­e­sis,” he told Olive Oil Times.

“That being, we may ulti­mately not be able to pro­duce the nec­es­sary poundage of fruit per acre to be a viable com­mer­cial com­mod­ity extra vir­gin olive oil loca­tion, but from a poten­tial med­i­c­i­nal aspect and what ulti­mately can be extracted from var­i­ous parts of the tree, we might be a very strong grow­ing loca­tion.”

• Orlando Sentinel


• My Farm Life


• University of Florida