Past President Dan is member of our club and has been a Rotarian since 1992, first joining rotary in Kununurra. He is a former President of the RC of Geraldton Greenough. He was the President the same year that Hugh Lavery was our District Governor.

 

Dan and his wife Maria bought a farming property in Gingin in 2009 and they moved permanently to Gingin over five years ago but he has maintained his membership with Rotary in Geraldton. The property he purchased had substantial olive groves and although he knew little of the olive business he harvested his first crop, which yielded 6 tonne in 2010. He has been involved with olives ever since and one year his property "Walkalina" produced 154 tonnes!

Olives trees are very resilient and there are some in the Northern hemisphere that have been in existence for around two thousand years. Dan has seen olive trees in Portugal that are over five hundred years old.

 

The art of farming olives is to prune your trees to the size of your harvesting equipment. At the moment Dan is pruning every second year and the trees come back stronger than ever. In terms of harvesting and crushing olives Dan has had a high of twenty thousand litres of production and a low of two thousand four hundred and seventy. The low occurred last year which Dan attributes to the weather being too hot when the trees were flowering.

 

The area, where he farms at Gingin, has about seventy five percent of WA's olive oil industry. However despite the trees resilience, the fact that they are planted in generally sandy soils means that they are very reliant on good seasonal rainfall and the right weather conditions. The major crops in the N hemisphere are on soils with far greater clay content where the trees can send down deeper roots.

 

He has around five thousand trees to harvest every year and works with a local Vietnamese born man to get all the fruit picked. Originally he was of the opinion that his sheep would graze the land under the trees, but he has come to conclusion that it is important to let an under tree growth burden build to create a bigger mulch base.

 

Questions:

Russell McKinnon- How is olive oil produced from the fruit? A - They are crushed at a processor which happens to be on a neighbouring property. The process turns the fruit in to an olive paste, and from here the oil is extracted.

 

Barry Dring- What happens to the paste after the oil has been removed? A - It can be buried, but that is of little value. In Europe the paste is turned into briquettes for burning. The Sumich company, who are olive producers in WA has a mountain of paste that they are storing for use.

 

Jim Dillon- What is the status of the big olive grove near Regans Ford because it looked like they were pulling out their trees? A - The property was purchased by new owners a couple of years ago and they are replanting their olive trees.