For tree changers who are still in the city, the dream of the country retreat or weekend farm holds a strong fascination. The desire to do something tangible, make something meaningful and become more self sufficient are all strong drivers for people who end up buying small scale farms, and especially those with an established olive grove.
However, the reality is that if you're a weekend farmer, you'll pretty quickly find that spending your preciously limited time off on the never-ending tasks associated with farm life will have you more tired and stressed than when you were able to veg out in front of the seasonal sport options. This is especially the case if your trees required some serious TLC to bring them back into production, or during the annual harvest season!
To help encourage new grove owners getting established, and to increase the likelihood that they'll get a return on time and money invested in their groves sooner rather than later, the Long Road Olive Co-op has put together a "done for you" service contract that includes integrated pest and disease monitoring and management, pruning, harvesting, and all other grove management activities. The outcome is that you get a beautiful grove that increases your property value, and decreases your stress because we'll manage it for you. You just have to sit back and enjoy the view, while feasting on the fresh olive oil from you own trees.
You bought your country retreat dreaming of sitting on the verandah with a glass of wine, looking out over your domain - not standing in mud at 6AM fighting peacock spot and broken drip lines.
Don't worry, so did we. One of the first things we discovered is that farming is harder than people realise, and weekend farming is harder again due to the amount of tasks that need tending to and the lack of time and energy left at the end of the working week. So we're here to help you.
You want a place that reminds you or your travels through the Mediterranean; row upon row of beautiful olive trees in their groves, shimmering in the sunshine, shading hillsides and winding mountain roads. What you have a is a feral forest of mature trees that nobody has cared for in a long time.
When olive groves are abandoned, they pose a serious environmental risk. Not only can pests such as fruit fly, scale and olive lace bug, and diseases like anthracnose, peacock spot and sooty mould, spread to other nearby groves, unharvested fruit is eaten by birds and then spread throughout native forests to establish as weeds. All these outcomes strain the potential for you to establish friendly relations with your new neighbours, as your property may already have cost them time and effort to manage your grove!
In some areas, olives are a declared noxious weed, which means that if your grove is identified as the site of the infestation, you can also be liable for some pretty serious fines from your governmental agricultural department.
Regular gardeners, landscapers and arborists are often unfamiliar with the growth habit of olive trees.
Did you know they'll respond differently to pruning than any other type of tree you've ever encountered?
Leaving the regenerative pruning of an abandoned grove to anyone without the necessary experience is a costly risk that many new grove owners take. You could lose up to four years' worth of potential income from your grove if you don't get it right at the beginning.
If the idea of a thriving olive grove appeals, but you don't know where to start and handing operations to an unknown contractor feels risky, we get it. We all felt the same.
Long before the Long Road Olive Co-op existed, we each tried going it alone too. It didn't work so well, and that's why we got together to form the co-operative.
Our founding members have spent a lot of time learning, and have built our best practice grove management skills over the last fifteen years so that by working with us, you can hit the ground running and learn from our mistakes before they become yours. We have tested all olive grove management theories and activities on our own trees and observed the outcomes before applying them to our managed groves so we have a better understanding of how your trees will respond.
As small scale olive grove specialists, we treat your trees with the same loving attention we give our own, whether you have one tree in your backyard, or 3000 trees in a paddock somewhere. They're not just a number to us.
In addition to the grove management side of the contract, our founding members have experience with operating a small scale olive oil processing faccility since 2009, whihc means that we understand both the art and science involved, and are uniquely positioned to help you achieve the highest quality, freshest olive oil from your own trees. Unlike many commercial fee-for-service processing facilities, we run a batch processing service, which means that the fruit from your grove will make the oil we return to you. We encourage the growers we work with to come and see the press, and experience the conversion of olives to oil for themselves to understand more about why olive oil is becoming such a precious commodity. This is an additional service that our co-op offers to the public, but if you're a co-op member, or one of our grove management service contract customers, you get first access to book your processing each season.
The "done for you" care protocol across the seasons:
It's a very good place to start!
So you've had a chat with us about what you'd like to achieve in your grove, you're keen to work with us and feel confident that together we can get your trees under control and productive again? Great!
The first activity is usually a good hair cut for the trees, and we'll undertake to complete an initial prune of all the trees in your grove within 30 days of you signing the service contract.
Next steps will follow depending on the time of year when the contract period begins. Read on for more information...
As the weather warms up and the days get longer, we'll be on the look out for hatching pests. These can be monitored through a variety of trap designs, as well as visual inspections. We'll keep a close eye on the situation to ensure that populations don't get out of hand and, if necessary, we'll intervene with organic or targeted insecticidal sprays. We prefer to use barrier defenses and other physical interventions before spraying though.
The other IPDM task on our agenda at this time of year is to apply a preventative spray for the fungal disease anthracnose (if weather conditions indicate it's necessary), which can cause your potential crop to fail before it even gets started. We'll be on that before the olive flower buds open, but not every bud will make it to being an olive, whether anthracnose is present or not...
If you have irrigation available in your grove, now's the time to pressure test the system and sort out any kinks in the lines or replace damaged drippers, ready for the summer ahead.
Depending on how the trees are looking, we may also apply some compost at this time of year to help support the trees with their flowering and fruit set nutrition requirements.
We'll be keeping an eye on the soil moisture levels, applying irrigation where available, or mulch of different types where it's not. Luckily olives don't need much water, it's more important to get the timing right for the fruit development.
Any tree suckers or low hanging branches that weren't taken care of in the last pruning will be a priority for removal as these can become a big risk to your trees if a fire passes through the grove during the dry season.
It sounds weird, but olive trees can also get sunburned; so we may need to apply a natural sunscreen to help them cope with the brightness! This is especially true if the initial pruning in your grove was undertaken close to the beginning of the hot weather, as the trees won't have had a lot of time to adapt to the extra sunshine on their branches before the heat arrives.
Depending on what we plan to do with the fruit from your trees, harvest will be arranged sometime from late March onwards. This is the main event for the Autumn period, and once your trees are picked, we'll be back to apply some good ol' fashioned compost to feed them up again for next year.
Our proprietary blend of compost is made from the olive oil processing waste, combined with the branches we prune off other olive trees, so it contains all the goodies that your trees need to make more fruit next season.
Not much happens in the cold season, although we'll be working on pruning the canopy for your trees and keeping an eye out for peacock spot; a cold weather fungal infection that can cause severe leaf drop.
Also on the agenda is soil sampling and testing.
This is the time of year where we start promoting the availability of our fresh season's olive oil, and our marketing efforts go to into overdrive so that we can help you get a return on your investment of working with us too.
Day 1
Needs TLC, but we'll bring them under control within 30 days.
Harvest
Where the fruit really shines. Friends and family will be astounded by the flavours of your grove.
ROI
You get 20% of the profits from products made with fruit from your grove.
IPDM
Making a difference through organic management practices.
You've invested in your dream property, now's the time to invest in making the dream a reality.
Everyone needs a little help to get from A to B.
There will be costly mistakes along the way if you try to go it alone; we know, we've been there.
Maybe $5000 per year over three years feels like a huge investment for tree maintenance, but the facts are that you could spend that much on replacing a single mature olive tree if something goes wrong trying to do it yourself.
The initial payment of $4000, followed by $1000 per quarter for the term of the contract allows us to cover the cost of getting your grove back into production, so that we can share the profits from it with you. Our service contract includes a 20% share of the profits from any products the co-op makes from your fruit.
With experienced, specialised small scale grove management contractors working in your grove, the long term increase in the value of your property, and your olive grove as an asset, will outweigh the initial investment in bringing it back into production.
The road looks long from the starting point...
And the image above shows some of the work that might be involved. But don't worry, we won't ruin the natural look of your grove or leave a pile of pruned branches behind.
As part of our zero-waste and organic approach to olive grove management, the pruned branches from your trees are turned into biochar on site, and incorporated back into the soil of your grove. This allows you to potentially participate in the carbon credits market, which may provide an additional income stream for your family.
Designing and managing ACCU projects can be complex and time consuming, but working with us makes the whole process much easier and more likely to succeed.
Maybe your grove feels too small for a large financial investment?
Your dream property came with a handful of trees along the driveway, or as a wind break on the boundary, or a privacy screen for the pool. You've got 100 trees that the real estate agent swore were great for making oil, but they couldn't tell you what variety they are.
Sure, there are cheaper contractors out there, but they don't specialise in small scale groves, or offer the full service management that we do. They won't tell you how to maximise the potential income streams from your grove because they're only looking at getting paid for the task that you've employed them to do. We do it all, so it's in our interest to help you get the maximum return on your investment in our time, expertise and activity while we're at your place.
One of the main challenges that small scale olive growers encounter when attempting to work with contractors for individual tasks, is that their machinery is just too big to effectively manoevre around the grove. This means that you'll pay for their service, but they may not be able to access all of your trees to carry out the work. As small scale specialists, the Long Road Olive Co-op has invested in size-appropriate equipment for all grove management tasks so you can rest assured that we will tend to each tree individually, just like we do on our groves.
What's your dream worth to you?
The initial prune of 100 established olive trees in an abandoned grove will take around 45 hours of labour. How much is your time worth per hour? If we can save you just this amount of labour, doesn't that make the upfront payment of $4000 worth it? When you consider how much the total value of your property will improve with a well tended olive grove as an additional asset, the longer term benefits of our service become even more attractive.
The total contract cost is $15,000 over three years, but remember, our aim is to get your grove back into production, so that you can also share in the profit from the sales of products made from your fruit. The money isn't all going out of your coffers, we're asking you for an investment in getting your asset up and running again in partnership with our expertise. With the financial data from your grove tracked, your $15,000 investment over three years could net you a sizable return if or when you decide to sell the property in the future.
Again, working on a grove of 100 established trees the return on your initial investment could be as much as 10 times what you've paid over the life of the contract, depending on what products are created from the fruit in that time.
Because all the Long Road Olive Co-op members are small scale olive growers ourselves, we know how to think outside the box when it comes to "profitable products" from your olive grove. We're not just interested in harvesting the fruit; there are more raw materials in an olive grove than you might think. We're not your average contractors, but partners in the success of your grove, here for the long road.
There's just one catch to working with us:
Because of the dedication and care we put into each grove that we undertake to manage, we can only work with four groves per season.
In order to find these growers, and to achieve the best outcome for them, we have an application process through which we determine who we'll be working with for the next year.
If you can see the value of working with specialist small scale grove management experts, who've been where you are and want to help you get to where you want to be on your farming journey, then click the button below to apply:
Apply for our full service contract now
Spring Season Begins
Get your applications in before time runs out!
Mediterranean Dreaming: How to turn your country retreat into a picture-perfect manicured olive grove (without spending a single weekend pruning, spraying or worrying about picking and processing the fruit)