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<pre>My comments are related to the what is now the status quo in the hunter
valley, no or little (quantity) fruit. There is a wealth of information
tucked away within this chat group. For example go to messages on poor
fruit set 3056 (M Kholy) & 3016 ( S Sibbett). For mechanical harvesting
2521 (S Sibbett) & 2495 ( D Conlan). Soil quality/irrigation 705 (V
Pisatra) & 3147 (S Sibbett). There are plenty more stored away in the
archives, just needs some diligent searching & collating.

I find that this information needs to be read & reread to make a full
impact. The emphasis of this electronic medium is on speed which doesnt
encourage much time for pondering.

Roger Farquhar

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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<pre>Regarding the recent vigorous discussion. I hope the following comments
will help.

¥ Traditional olive growing regions have a Mediterranean Climate ie Cold
to mild Wet winter with a long hot dry summer.

¥ Outside of this type of climate other factors have to be taken into
account - Dry winters, wet summers. A number of olive projects have been
attempted in India and China. However even with the greater availability
of manual labour, no real industry has developed in either country. The
climates there are similar to those of North-east NSW and South East QLD
ie monsoonal.

¥ Regarding irrigation - for nearly 6000 years olives have been grown
with limited water - coming from rainfall and to some extent
supplementary watering - however the water has to come at the right
time. Rainfalls around the Mediterranean tend to be zero to 600mm. So
where zero is the order of the day then supplementary water, dry farming
techniques and even waiting for the alternate bearing cycle to produce
olives is practiced. But in general there is no summer rain.

¥ Regarding harvesting - Again for nearly 6000 years olives have been
picked manually. I believe this practice will continue for many.
Facilitated manual harvesting will be practiced in small groves. With
larger groves - there will be problems that will have to be managed
carefully otherwise crops will stay on the trees, olives will be picked
at inappropriate maturation times, expected yields will not be reached.
Why will there be problems? Firstly while I agree that there are no
olive experts - this is worldwide, there however many who specialise in
some aspect of olives - growing, processing, disease management etc- and
these can be found in Australia, Argentina, Egypt, Italy, Spain, Greece
etc. If we are talking about Australia, where the problem I see is that
very few Australians have the experience to manage 500-1000ha fruit
orchards profitably let alone olive orchards - where cultivar
performance is questionable, the technologies are still being learnt and
many of these are still under-developed.

Now turning to harvesting - the experiment is still proceeding - in the
forseeable future (20-40years) there will be several harvesting
methods. It may be that a combination of methods has to be used. The
current technologies include:

¥ Shakers - 50-60% developed
¥ Overhead-harvesters - experimental
¥ Chemical Abscising Agents - Lose leaves, fruit and still need to be
approved
¥ Other

Thus my analysis is that the shakers appear to be the most likely
prospect - hence trees have to be trained.

In a previous note to the group I indicated that the effort required in
the industry will be :

Producing olives - 25%
Processing - 25%
Marketing - 50%

So if growing is a problem - and all the effort is being directeded
there - who is looking after the marketing?

The olive industry outside of the Mediterranean is at a critical stage.
Everyone must be focussed and strategic. Pressures will come from within
countries as well as from outside. There will be pressures to
amalgamate, centralise, standardise etc. If the industry is to succeed
it needs all players - small, medium and large. Some views are that
small growers with their individual olive oils will disappear. If that
is the case then nationally produced olive products will lose their
unique position and be relegated to the supermarket shelf.

Stan Kailis
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<pre>Dear Bill

Send me your contact addresses - Postal and Fax

I have run many courses on olives over the last 5 years. This has
included 3 one week schools at New Norcia on olive growing.

Our next activity is a one day table olive workshop on May 27.

Stan Kailis
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