09 Nov

California: Wine/olive growers get a free break

County supervisors, in an effort to support wineries and olive growers, are lowering the amount of transportation fees growers are required to pay. The fee will be based only on the square footage of the commercial use area, such as wine/olive oil tasting and sales facilities. The processing facilities or light industrial component will be […]

05 Nov

Off The Beaten Path: The Wolfskill Olive Ranch

“A tree will produce and produce. You can neglect it, abuse it, forget about it, not water it and it’ll still produce olives,” says Dan Flynn, a U.C. Davis scientist. They stand as immovable sentinels of the past. Many of these giant mission olive trees are almost four stories tall and at nearly a century […]

05 Nov

Olive oil milling is rapidly taking hold in S.J.

By Reed Fujii, LODI – Jeff Colombini is the president of Lodi Farming, a large diversified farming operation. Still, early last week, he found himself on a towering harvester clattering down rows of a 3-year-old olive orchard, gathering fruit destined to yield a greenish-yellow gold in the form of oil. No, he wasn’t short of […]

03 Nov

Vigilance saves olive trees from infestation

By Julie Kaufmann (Mercury News) Our stories about home-cured olives and the widespread infestation of the olive fruit fly in our area (Food & Wine, Oct. 24) brought a phone call from Phil Cosentino, who retired from the family grocery business and now grows and sells fruit from more than 500 trees on two acres […]

03 Nov

2008 Californian crop production could surpass that of France, official says

By Elizabeth Larson, Moving along at a pace of about 2 acres per hour, Olive Glen Orchards’ new Australian-designed olive harvester began making its way through hundreds of acres of trees last week, as harvesting of olives for olive oil started in the Sacramento Valley. Patricia Darragh, executive director of the California Olive Oil Council, […]