Crop Report, Table Olives Summer 2024

Triple Digit Weather!

From the last day of June all through July we suffered from triple digit weather here in olive country. Olive trees are a species adapted to harsh desert conditions, however, irrigation days had to be doubled to keep up with the amount of transpiration the trees experienced. Thick waxy leaves kept the trees from suffering any sorching, unlike the prune and almond trees in our area, which suffered.

Manzanillo Olive Status

The Manzanillo Crop looks good; the tonnage is on forecast and we anticipate no issues. The size of the olives does not vary much between end July and when the olives are fully mature. We're looking at the early harvest pick happening Sunday, September 8th and UPS pick up Monday, September 9th. Here are side by side images of my hand next to the Manzanillo olives. You can see that the fruit is bigger in August, however, the rate of growth is subtle when compared to Sevillanos.

Sevillano Olive Status

These handsome olives show a real difference in size from month to month, and in the last days of August still "sizing up". As you are probably aware, the olive crop has been light globally in recent years, and the overall tonnage for Sevillano was especially hard hit. The trees have bounced back with a very heavy crop load, however, the more olives per tree, the smaller the size

What this means for folks looking for Very Big Olives, is that it is unlikely that there will be many "Super Colossal" sized olives this year, if any. We're working to grade the fruit so that we can ship mostly Colossal with some Giants in our Sevillano shipments.

I had fun comparing this year's Sevillano size from bloom to August. The September image is from the end of September last year and is posted here to help understand the size we'll be shipping.