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<pre>+ACoAKgAq- Mike wrote:
I grow both olives and wine grapes, and as you say, grapes need a heck of a
lot more intervention than olives...so far.
As the olive industry is still very much in its infancy here, I do wonder
what will be the prevailing regime in 20 years time, when the tress are
fully grown, the soils are becoming exhausted and use of chemical
fertilisers becomes more commercially important.

Wine grapes are notorious for picking up flavours from the soil,
fertilisers, mulch, etc and this limits what is regarded as +ACI-best
practice+ACI-
in the wine grape business. Certainly the addition of cow manure would not
do a lot for a fine semillon+ACEAIQ-

What will be the case with olives? Will the olives and the resulting oil
show traces of the growing practices, as well as soil +ACY- region? +ACoAKgAq-

To do an organic approach to agriculture you do not need necessarily cow
manure which is not available everywhere, sheep manure would do as well and
I learned there are lots of sheep in Australia and NZ. Another good
fertiliser would be chicken manure or even imported guano.
But you can do more than that by growing legumes which add nitrogen to the
soil and have other positive effects. For best benefit he soil must be
worked again before the legumes form the fruit. If you don't have problems
with parasites you might also mulch the pruning instead of burning them.
As you grow grapes you will know that high quantity and high quality exclude
each other. The same is true for olives, even though in a less clear
relation. To prevent exhaustion of the soil it should be analysed regularly
and missing elements should be added. I do not see big problems using
inorganic additives if you care to keep the organic substance in the soil at
a high level. Of course this would not be 'pure' organic agriculture, it is
kind of a third way. A soil is not only exhausted if some element is missing
(which you could add), but it is also 'exhausted' when it is not able to
transfer these elements to the plant. This is often more important than the
mere quantity of the element. Example: If you put a lot of urea in an
'exhausted' soil, the nitrogen will be washed out, you will have a strong
pollution of the ground water but not all the nitrogen will be transferred
to the olive trees. You might even have problems with burned roots and
fungine diseases.
A last observation, even though not 'scientific'. Last year when we milled
our olives there was another farmer from our area who had good looking
olives, sane and mature as ours. As we wanted to buy more oil, we tested his
product. It had a low acidity, but the taste was quite flat. Talking about
his methods we found out that 'per tree' he produced much more than we did
because he fertilised with good quantities of urea while we use very little
quantities of inorganic fertilizers (less than 'needed'). I am not sure if
the 'flat' taste is related to his preference for quantity, but it seems to
be so. We tested oil from other farmers who do organic farming, and those
with sane olives had a very tasty oil. Might be interesting to read about
scientific research in this field.
Volker
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<pre>Volker thanks for those observations.

With wine grapes we are learning that canopy management is very important
for quality fruit i.e. the more open your canopy the more sun can get into
the fruit and therefore the fruit ripens more evenly. Could we use those
same principles for olives.

You may have noticed that olive fruit hidden inside the tree are less ripe
than those on the outside, which are moreexposed to the sun. Could we train
olive trees like a hedgerow ? It this principle is correct then can we plant
our olives trees closer together.

Planting olive trees on an 8 x 5 metre grid does not allow many trees in a
hectare - roughly 250 trees.

Regards

Phil
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