9959 Olive Production

heres a site that gives prices ... over the last thirteen months...
[url=http://www.ismea.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/IDPagina/154]ISMEA - Oli e olive mensa - Prezzi medi mensili per prodotto[/url]

i think what you have to consider is how much you could push out yourselves taking on bottling ,labelling and marketing...

another consideration in this is the quality and if it is possible for you to obtain much like wine a higher price by it being produced in a specific doc type zone...and also off one type of specific olive variety...

the other point with olives that makes value ...is how you refine it... you need an old fashioned cold press mill near you... in order to pick and press quickly... using new filters for your oil and the mill being able to certify that it is also a biological or chemical free mill only milling olives without chemicals

Thanks very much for the info and the link :) Will add those questions, especially about the cold press mill and what type of olives - hadn't even thought about that, to the ever growing list I have!

Just a thought, I believe recent legislation has been designed so that any bottle marked Italian Olive Oil will have to be just that , not blended with Spanish oil etc which should result in a much better price for the genuine article. The price I have been getting in the past has been way below that obtainable in the UK but I guess that is to be expected. 1000 litres sounds like a lot - how many trees do you have?

[quote=elliven;92827]1000 litres sounds like a lot - how many trees do you have?[/quote]
I'd be interested to know how many trees are on the land as well.

I definitely make no claims about being any sort of olive farmer, but last year we got 27 litres of oil from our 43 trees. Now, last year was a bad one for yield for everyone due to drought, our trees had been pruned by someone who knew nothing about the task other than what he'd picked up from books and the trees were fairly small (small enough to be picked while standing on the ground), yet we were told that our trees had done not badly compared to others here abouts.

The amount of oil we got from each tree was about 0.6 litre. At that rate, you'd need something like 1,600 trees to get 1,000 litres. Obviously, even if one makes allowances for our trees performing so poorly that their yield was just a third of what it might be, you're still talking about what I'd consider to be a very large number of trees.

When you've calcualted how many thousands of Euros you would earn if what you've been told about yield is the truth, you might give some thought to the work required to prune and harvest an olive grove consisting of several hundred trees.

Al

We have 80 trees now,in our first year 2006 we had 50 litres of oil, the trees had been neglected for a long time, last year was a dreadful year and we did not harvest any, our neighbours also suffered and their trees are in much better condition than ours, this year is looking better, but we dont depend on our trees for our income, just for our own use and to give to friends.
1000 litres is alot of oil, if you are dependant on the income and have a year like last year I would be very worried, also a huge amount of labour involved, will be interested to hear what you decide to do.
A

[quote=Angie and Robert;92834]1000 litres is alot of oil, if you are dependant on the income and have a year like last year I would be very worried...[/quote]
Ah, but Suzanne and Jeff have been promised that the olive grove on the property they're looking at will:
[quote=suzanne & jeff;92778]produce [I][B]at least[/B][/I] 1000 litres of oil a year.[/quote]
So I guess they must be some sort of super strain of olive tree. Or maybe the current owner has a secret stash of water that allowed him to irrigate the trees lavishly in 2007.

I think it might be interesting to ask the person who gave this assurance if they really meant that the olives on the property produced 1,000 litres in 2007. To give them the benefit of the doubt, I suspect they might have meant that the trees do that in an average year or that yield might hit that level in an exceptional year.

Yet - and I know I'm being all horrid and cynical again - unless there are an awful lot of trees on the land and they're exceptionally well cared for and situated, I somehow suspect that the nice, round figure of a minimum production of 1,000 litres was plucked from the fertile imagination of an agent who knows much more about selling than olive cultivation.

Al

[quote=AllanMason;92836] - and I know I'm being all horrid and cynical again - [/quote]

At least you can multitask! :laughs:

I would also be very suspicious of those figures. Perhaps what has been quoted is a truly excepcional year... but you should get an average for the past 5-10 years to be on the safe side. So many lies are told when they try to sell you a property.... There are very honest real estate agents who would not do that, but there are plenty of the other kind around..... Also, sometimes owners exagerate about figures to try to sell the property. Ask the neighbours, a good source of information.

[I]According to the agent.....[/I] he just states 1000 litres. Both Allans and Angie's figures are almost identical so I assume Allans figure of 1600 is pretty close.The land is 10 acres - can you get 1600 trees on that much land:masked: I have no idea. We've only looked at the details in brief. TBH the olives wouldn't be the reason if we choose that property, the accommodation would, but it would obviously impact on the decision we made.

I do get that sellers try to inflate their prices. A few years ago we made an offer, and it was accepted verbally. Came back to England to sort out the deposit, only to be contacted to say that it had been sold to some long lost cousin for 2k more than we offered. He then tried to persuade us to buy it for an extra 15k :eeeek: We declined, and sadly the house is falling down because no-one is going to buy it at that price :(

Good suggestion about getting the average over the last 5-10 years, thanks :) Did I miss anything?

[quote=suzanne & jeff;92856]...the olives wouldn't be the reason if we choose that property, the accommodation would, but it would obviously impact on the decision we made.[/quote]
Thanks for the additional info.

Ten acres is about 4 hectares. Olives can be planted in all sorts of densities, but a spacing of about 6 metres is probably something near typical. For the sake of argument, assume your 4 hectares are arranged in a neat box 200 metres on a side and the trees are planted in a perfect grid. At 6 metres between trees, you could have 1100 trees. That is a [I]lot[/I] of olive trees and a [I]lot[/I] of work.

I'm very pleased that 7 hectares of land around our house came with it in the purchase, but people do sometimes overlook the fact that land needs to be maintained. The very idea of having an olive grove is all so romantic and they [I]can[/I] just be left to grow as they will, but that approach will make harvesting the olives - should you decide to at least do that - increasingly difficult and dangerous over time, the yield from the trees will not be optimal and if scrub is left to grow under the trees it will be a fire hazard which will win you no points with the neighbours.

It seems to me the bottom line is that a few olive trees (something between 50 and 100, say) and a bit of land can be a wonderful thing to have, but a huge olive grove and vast swathes of acreage can be mainly a burden if one doesn't want to be a proper farmer.

Al

Thanks Allan. Puts into perspective just how many trees it is! It wasn't something we were looking for, like you say 50 -100 would be nice. Might be the very reason we don't follow up on the details!