How a California olive grower is adapting to drought conditions

Click here for updates on this story

    California (KCRA) — California’s water supply is critical to the state’s agriculture industry. Up to 80% of table olives come from California, and while olive trees are more drought-tolerant than other crops, that isn’t stopping Northern California olive growers from making significant changes to conserve our most precious resource.

Olives are a passion for Dennis Burreson, who says he’s held just about every job with Musco Family Olive Company since joining Musco 43 years ago.

Burreson, who is now a vice president of field operations and industry affairs, helps growers understand and adapt to California’s changing weather climate.

Burreson and his three sons, all olive growers themselves, helped shape a type of planting called modern acreage, which includes increased tree count and double drip line irrigation.

“Now instead of being 40, 50, 60 trees per acre and using flood irrigation at three to four acre-feet per year, we are doing 240 trees per acre and using maybe a third amount of that water,” he said.

This didn’t happen overnight. Some of Burreson’s trees are over 100 years old. Forty years ago they were flood-irrigated.

Burreson said that when crops were still flood irrigated, a ditch was filled with water from a local district. The water was then sent to a secondary irrigation system.

The ditch system has since been replaced with hoses and micro sprinklers.

This takes care of the older orchards. But 10 years ago, Musco adopted a new way of planting olive trees so they could be drip irrigated and mechanically harvested.

All of these methods, both for the old and new trees, come from lessons learned from past drought years.

Burreson has teamed up with the UC Davis Olive Center to focus not just on surviving California’s droughts, but thriving through them.

“Once the UC Davis Olive Center came into fruition, it kind of put everything on steroids,” he said.

Now being researched is just when the best times of the day are to water olive orchards.

“We have meteorologists, we have soil sensors, we have a plant physiologist who can really figure out what the farmer can do to apply water very efficiently,” he said.

Crop management and less water use in olive growing are two areas that can benefit the entire state.

“What could be more important than making sure the safety and integrity of the food chain, and that you had something to do with that?” Burreson said.

Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.