Shawn's Blog

This is the time of year when a lot of people with a few landscape trees or hobby orchardists see a crop ripening and decide to try to make oil with their fruit. Frequently tree owners are unfamiliar with the existence of the olive fly, the effects of the fly on the quality of olive oil, and how to identify olive fly damage to fruit. This post is not about how to control the fly or the effects of fly damage as that has been covered in great detail many places including on our site.   This post is intended...

I took some grief about my post on August 9th, among other things being accused of doing "marketing" which sort of perplexed me.  I did not mention our products, I did not make any comparisons of anything we do to anyone else, nor are we really a competitor of Deo Leo as we could only hope to be operating on that scale and we don't operate in that market.  While completely unfounded, it did serve to make me think more about this topic. As much as I deplore lawsuits, there may be some good coming out of them in forcing everyone to...

In May, I wrote about the peculiar bloom and fruit set we were experiencing.  I thought that it could prove to be a very interesting year. First, I should make a few qualifications about my comments below though. Most of the exposure I get to growing operations is in the coastal zones of California and tend to be from about Monterey south. Also, for the most part they are traditionally farmed orchards and not super high density operations. That being said, during the year I do talk to a lot of people throughout the state and it seems that it is...

I have been following, at some remove, the steady flow of lawsuits in the olive oil industry, not in small part through The Olive Oil Times but also through other media. It is really a staggering lineup including so many of the giants like Deoleo, Filippo Berio, Safeway Inc., Capatriti (Kangadis), and the most recent additions to the list, J.M. Smucker Co./Transnational Foods Inc. Something that caught my attention in these costly mudslinging exercises, however, were some of the statements made by Deoleo CEO Pierluigi Tosato as reported in Just-Food (7/13/18) and The Olive Oil Times (7/11/18). Mr. Tosato makes...

Last week I was out on a small consulting project that has been particularly rewarding. My client wanted to be involved in agriculture on a hobby level. He wanted to farm something on a small scale, not go into it with any particular commercial intent, and produce something he could really take pride in. After looking at a number of options, he ultimately bumped into a constraint that we are all faced with: water costs. That made the decision easy, he would produce olive oil as all the other crops considered required far too much water. Being involved in the...