Title: Super high density olive trees for oil next success story? | Farm Progress
Headings: Super high density olive trees for oil next success story?
Super high density olive trees for oil next success story?
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Content: Table olives have been grown commercially in California for decades. However, acreage of primarily Mission and Manzanillo variety table olives has changed little for decades. Foreign competition has strangled California’s table olive industry. Europeans have for decades also flooded the U.S. market with inexpensive olive oil thanks to post World War II trade agreements. Olive oil has never been at the top of the supermarket shopping list for most American consumers, but that all changed when nutritionists started extolling the health attributes of olive oil. U.S. olive oil consumption has soared in the past decade from 31 million gallons to 65 million gallons annually. As American consumers embrace olive oil for cooking, salad dressings and numerous other uses, they are demanding better quality oil than what is mostly imported from Europe. This demand for better quality is comparable to the evolution from so-called jug wines to varietal wines in America. California premium olive oil production has more than doubled in the past five years to get a piece of this growing market, but the 383,000 gallons produced last year did not even make a ripple in U.S. olive market of 65 million gallons. California Olive Ranch produced about a third of California’s 2004 production.