🌳 Olive grove

An olive grove is a plot planted with olive trees, harvested for oil and table olives. According to the International Olive Council (IOC), there are over 11 million hectares of olives in the world across 47 olive oil producing countries, but 98 % of the fruit is harvested in the Mediterranean. In the Northern Hemisphere oil olives are picked from October to April, in the Southern Hemisphere from April to July.

Groves differ in planting density. Traditional ones are still the most common: according to FAO, they have 50–100 trees per hectare, often on slopes and terraces and without irrigation, yielding from less than a tonne to five tonnes of fruit per hectare. Intensive orchards have 200–550 trees per hectare, each on a single trunk for machine harvesting; with irrigation they bear from the 2nd–4th year, up to 10–15 t/ha.

Super-intensive hedgerow orchards have 1,000–2,000 trees per hectare. They are harvested by straddle harvesters that drive over the row, and they cannot do without irrigation. Only 4–6 of the more than 600 cultivars in the world germplasm bank are suitable for them, the best known being Arbequina, Arbosana and Koroneiki. Where water is scarce, slopes are steep or farms are small, researchers suggest “pedestrian” orchards with 400–1,000 trees.

Oil yield also depends on density: according to a 2015 IOC study, it ranges from 370 kg per hectare in traditional rain-fed groves on steep slopes to 1,579 kg in super-intensive orchards. Still, 74 % of orchards in the countries studied are traditional. Orchards are planted with cuttings of known cultivars and stay profitable for about 50 years.

Reading a label. The type of orchard is rarely printed on a bottle, but the rules of protected names hint at it. The specification for «Istra» oil, for instance, allows no more than 450 trees per hectare, which rules out hedgerow orchards as its source.