My Plans for Becoming an Olive Farmer
This is my journey.
We bought the mountain and have been thinking of ways to monetise it. From a few glamping pods to camper van pitches, I've thunk them all.
The land we have on the mountain was eucalyptus and pine, but before that there were olive trees. A lot of them.
Where the pine was burnt off and cut down around 2017, much of it hasn't grown back. Instead, the Cistus Labdanum took hold and grabbed a fair chunk of the land.
This hid what would eventually become my master plan.
I'm not looking for big bucks, just enough to live. The hardest part for us is replacing income. I'm developing a few different themes rather than making one thing the be-all and end-all.
We have lots of little things that could potentially produce an income without needing to turn the mountain into some enormous commercial operation.
So. Olives.
Just from the number of trees I have, on paper I reckon the olives could eventually produce around £12,000 a year.
That's a target, not a promise. I've still got to get the trees properly back into production and find out what they actually yield.
And that figure assumes I simply harvest the whole lot and dump them at the local cooperativa.
I'm not going to do this.
My First Experiment
I've already washed and brined around 100kg of olives, purely to see what they would be like.
My olive trees are overgrown, out of shape and have pretty much everything wrong with them.
Some of them are absolute monsters.
So that first batch of brined olives was on the small side.
BUT they tasted superb.
I added various spices and garlic to them and absolutely loved eating them.
The €0.35 Experiment
The very first batch of olives I picked in 2024 went to the local cooperativa.
I made sure there were no dead ones, sticks or leaves amongst them. I had shades of blue and purple olives, black ones and green ones. They looked stunning.
But I only had about 50kg.
It was my tester. I wanted to see what I'd actually earn.
The offer?
€0.35 a kilo.
Two years later I still have the credit note.
The chap who owned the place took me on a tour of his facility.
I was like WOW.
And I say wow because I looked at the olives that were getting processed and thought, fuck me, I could literally have scooped the old olives off the grass and taken them in.
There were leaves, bits of sticks and God knows what else.
Then I watched them disappear up a conveyor and out of sight.
Afterwards he showed me 10kg buckets of finished olives for €30. Granted, they were huge olives.
But my big old brain thought:
Fuck this lark. I'll do it me self!
Bringing the Old Trees Back
This last winter was a tad wet and I decided to hard prune a lot of the olive trees.
Which basically means those trees aren't going to produce much, if anything, immediately after I've attacked them.
The point is to bring them back under control and build healthy new growth for future harvests.
I hard pruned about 100 olive trees and cleared the ground around them.
I'm genuinely excited to go back just to see what they look like.
After the hard prune I was burning the wood for around a full day. I got more trimmings off one tree than the locals seem to get off about 50.
I'm not kidding.
Some of mine were around 40 feet tall, maybe taller.
Now they're at a sensible height.
The Plan
The dream is that over the next few years these ancient olive trees come properly back into production.
I've got somewhere around 500 to 600 of them, plus more trees dotted all over the higher parts of the mountain.
Some of the wild trees are producing olives the size of cats.
I'm not going to pretend I know what every tree will eventually produce. That's part of this experiment.
I've done the first 100.
The plan this year is to tackle another 150 and start getting those ready as well.
Then we'll see what happens.
If it works, brilliant.
If it doesn't, you'll get to watch that happen too.
YAY.