Rain and Snow Across California Too Late for Slumping Olive Oil Production

California’s olive farm­ers are sigh­ing with relief after the state received its largest snow­fall since 1983.

A series of snow­storms at the begin­ning of March blan­keted a sig­nif­i­cant swatch of the Golden State – from Lake Tahoe in the north to the sub­urbs of Los Angeles – in one to three meters of snow.

According to the United States Drought Monitor, inland snow cou­pled with ample rain along the coasts means some of the state’s most fruit­ful olive-grow­ing regions are no longer in a state of ​“severe” or ​“extreme” drought.

“The recent abun­dance of pre­cip­i­ta­tion in the Sierra Nevada and through­out California has greatly reduced short-term drought con­di­tions through­out the state,” Andrew Schwartz, the lead sci­en­tist and man­ager at the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory at the University of California-Berkeley, told Newsweek.

“However, a sig­nif­i­cant amount of ground­wa­ter recharge is still needed before the long-term drought can be con­sid­ered over, and we will need sev­eral above-aver­age years for that to hap­pen,” he added.

Recent rain and snow may pro­vide a reprieve for olive grow­ers in the com­ing 2023/24 crop year after the worst drought con­di­tions of the past 130 years affected olive devel­op­ment and fruition in spring 2022.

As a result, olive oil pro­duc­tion in California, which is respon­si­ble for vir­tu­ally all U.S. pro­duc­tion, is expected to slip to a four-year low.

The effects of the drought com­pounded erratic cli­matic events in spring 2022 and some of the state’s pro­duc­ers enter­ing an ​‘off-year’ in the nat­ural alter­nate bear­ing cycle of the olive tree.

Producers across the Golden State said warm weather in February 2022 resulted in many olive trees blos­som­ing early, fol­lowed by a cold spring snap which dam­aged the blos­soms and pre­vented fruit from form­ing.

While coastal grow­ers were largely spared from this event, some reported tree dam­age from the high winds. In addi­tion, many pro­duc­ers with­out irri­ga­tion saw their trees suf­fer the con­se­quences of the per­sis­tent drought.

The Olive Oil Commission of California, which rep­re­sents 90 per­cent of the state’s pro­duc­tion, pre­dicted that this year’s yield would fall to 1.8 mil­lion gal­lons in its pre­lim­i­nary esti­mate pub­lished in July.

While the OOCC has not pub­lished its final fig­ures and did not respond to ques­tions from Olive Oil Times about the 2022/23 crop year, pro­duc­ers across the state said the final yields would likely be lower.

Cliff Little, the pres­i­dent of Corto Olive, the sec­ond-largest olive oil pro­ducer in the U.S., said the erratic weather sig­nif­i­cantly affected some groves in the state while spar­ing oth­ers.

“Our grow­ers in the north were more affected by the freeze in the spring that dam­aged the buds,” he told Olive Oil Times. ​“We did­n’t have a very good fruit set this year. We saw that par­tic­u­larly in and around us in the Lodi-Stockton area.”

However, Little added that some of Corto Olive’s grow­ers from the San Joaquin Valley, which runs through the state’s cen­ter, and parts of south­ern California were far less affected. ​“A lit­tle bit fur­ther south had really nice crops this year,” he said

“We got no rain­fall before the har­vest,” Little added. ​“All of our orchards are irri­gated, so we have the ben­e­fit of being able to time irri­ga­tions a bit to pre­pare the olives on the trees for har­vest and did­n’t have any issues with mois­ture.”

While the drought was a sig­nif­i­cant prob­lem across California, Little said the sparse rain that did fall com­pli­cated the start of the har­vest in late October, forc­ing the team to start and stop spo­rad­i­cally to avoid dam­ag­ing the trees.

Meanwhile, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, Giulio Zavolta, co-owner of Olivaia Olive Estate in Lindsay, con­firmed a lower har­vest than usual.

“Last year [2021/22] was a low har­vest year, and so we were hop­ing for a good year this year, but it did­n’t turn out to be a good year,” he told Olive Oil Times. ​“We’ve done a lit­tle bit bet­ter than last year, but we’re prob­a­bly at 40 per­cent of what we could have har­vested.”

“In the spring, we got freak­ishly cold weather,” Zavolta added. ​“The trees had already bloomed, and it froze. In our case, we lost 25 to 30 per­cent of our bloom. Then, shortly after, we had tem­per­a­tures above 100 ºF (more than 38 ºC). It was­n’t long, but still, that is a huge swing that can’t be good for any tree just start­ing and try­ing to set some olives.”

Zavolta believes the drought is par­tially respon­si­ble for the low har­vests of the past few years. His tra­di­tional grove com­prises 125-year-old trees. The fan jets he installed to irri­gate them do not reach the entire root struc­ture, so the trees also require rain which was scarce in his cor­ner of California.

“In years past, we always used to ben­e­fit from the snow­pack, but because that would replen­ish our ground­wa­ter,” he said.

This year’s above-aver­age snow­pack should restore some of Zavolta’s ground­wa­ter and allow him to pump more than he was able to in the past cou­ple of years, which he hopes means the com­ing crop year will be more fruit­ful than the pre­vi­ous.

Despite the reprieve, California is expected to con­tinue to become hot­ter and drier in the com­ing decades.

As a result, Zavolta believes the state’s olive oil sec­tor will con­tinue to tran­si­tion toward mod­ern olive groves, which are more water effi­cient. However, he hopes there will still be sup­port for his­toric olive groves, includ­ing his own.

“I would hate to see all of that her­itage being torn out of the ground to make room for mod­ern acreage,” he said. ​“There’s a spe­cial place in the world for cen­ten­nial trees. We have them, and we should be keep­ing them.”

• Newsweek
• The New York Times