California, Lodi’s latest fruit
Across California’s wine districts, growers have long eyed the olive as a second crop. The tree likes the same warm, dry ground as the vine — but the real breakthrough was mechanical, when someone realised a grape harvester could be modified to pick oil olives too.
Go to almost any olive-oil district in the New World and you will find it shadowing a wine region. California is the classic case: the olive and the vine share a taste for warm days, cool nights and well-drained hillsides, so where grapes flourish, olives usually can too. For growers already set up for wine, olives look like a natural hedge — a second high-value crop on familiar land. But liking the same climate was never the hard part. Picking the fruit affordably was.
The machine that changed the maths
Olives are small, and hand-picking them for oil is slow and costly — a killing expense where labour is dear. The breakthrough that made New-World oil viable was borrowed from the vineyard. Growers planted oil olives in dense, trellised hedgerows, trained low and narrow, then drove over-the-row harvesters — the tall, straddling machines built to shake grapes, coffee and blueberries — straight down the lines. A modified grape harvester, curtains and chutes added, could strip an olive hedge in a fraction of the time and cost of a crew.
Super-high-density, explained
This is the system behind much modern oil: super-high-density (SHD) planting, hundreds to well over a thousand trees per hectare, grown as a continuous hedge and machine-harvested. It transformed the economics of olive oil in California, Australia, Argentina, Spain and Tunisia alike. The upside is fresh, cheap, consistent oil; the trade-off is that only certain compact, early-bearing cultivars suit the hedgerow, so SHD groves lean on a short list of varieties rather than the old diversity.
What it means in the bottle
Machine harvesting is not a mark against quality — quite the opposite. Because the harvester moves fast and the mill is usually close by, SHD fruit is often crushed within hours, giving bright, fresh oil. The honest catch is narrowness: a landscape optimised for the machine tends toward a handful of workhorse cultivars and a certain uniformity of style. For everyday extra virgin that is no bad thing. For character and rarity, you still look to the old groves the machines cannot reach.
| Traditional grove | Super-high-density | |
|---|---|---|
| Trees per hectare | Tens to low hundreds | Hundreds to 1,500+ |
| Harvest | Often by hand | Over-the-row machine |
| Fruit to mill | Can be slow | Usually within hours |
| Cultivar choice | Wide | A short compact list |
| Best for | Character, rarity | Fresh, consistent, affordable oil |
The takeaways
- Olives and vines share a climate, which is why wine regions keep adding oil.
- The real enabler was the modified grape harvester, not the tree.
- SHD hedgerows make oil cheap and fresh — but narrow the cultivars.
- Machine-picked is not lower quality; speed to the mill often makes it fresher.
Olives and vineyards: common questions
Why do wine regions grow olives too?
Because the olive and the vine like the same warm, dry, well-drained ground, so a grower set up for grapes can often add olives as a second high-value crop.
Can a grape harvester pick olives?
Yes — modified over-the-row grape harvesters, with curtains and chutes added, are the standard way to pick oil olives grown in dense trellised hedgerows.
What is super-high-density planting?
Growing oil olives as a continuous hedge at hundreds to over a thousand trees per hectare, trained for machine harvesting — the system behind much modern olive oil.
Is machine-harvested oil lower quality?
No. Fast machine picking usually gets fruit to the mill quickly, which favours fresh, bright oil. The real trade-off is a narrower range of cultivars, not worse oil.
Which olives suit the hedgerow?
Compact, early-bearing cultivars that tolerate close planting and machine harvest — a short list of workhorse varieties rather than the full traditional diversity.
People assume hand-picked means better and machine-picked means worse. In olive oil it is often the reverse. A super-high-density grove with its own mill can crush the fruit within hours of shaking it off the hedge, and speed to the mill is one of the truest predictors of a fresh, lively oil. What you lose to the machine is not quality but variety — the strange old cultivars on awkward slopes that no harvester can reach. Buy SHD oil for honest freshness; hunt the old groves for character.
Background on New-World olive growing, super-high-density orchards and mechanical harvesting.