In March 2021, Stephen Janak, a program specialist for Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, which supplies analysis and coaching to growers throughout the state, drove throughout Texas, crisscrossing farm-to-market roads from Madisonville to Bandera. The earlier 12 months had seen a bumper crop of olives—the biggest manufacturing 12 months thus far, the fruits of a decade-long growth within the Texas olive oil business.
However as Janak visited growers—as he did repeatedly to test on selection trials—he noticed fields stuffed with useless bushes. As a substitute of the shiny, inexperienced, feather-shaped leaves that had crammed orchards solely a month earlier than, he noticed acres and acres of brown. Winter Storm Uri had simply gripped the state in a brutal and unrelenting chilly, breaking data for the longest below-freezing streak within the state’s historical past. Olive orchards had been decimated. The freeze reached so deep that the bark on some bushes break up open, like a wound. North of Interstate 10, Janak would uncover that almost each tree had frozen to the bottom.
There hasn’t been an olive harvest in Texas since then. Subsequent freezes in 2022 and 2023, and now 2024, killed or broken the younger bushes growers planted, which had been extra weak to frost than mature bushes. Now the Texas olive oil business—as soon as poised to compete with California’s for the large American market—is in limbo. “The vast majority of the oldsters within the business are in a wait-and-see mode,” Janak says. Most growers have scaled again their orchards, ready to see how this winter unfolds. They aren’t managing or irrigating as intensively. Some have gotten out of the enterprise solely. Others have pivoted to importing oil from California or Europe.
“When you checked out olives in Texas at a three-year snapshot, it’d be very easy to say it’s not a viable crop in Texas,” says Michael Paz, the CEO of Texana Manufacturers, a grower and miller with an orchard in South Texas. “Individuals doing it are completely insane. However the reality is, when you become involved in olives, there may be this factor that occurs; it’s a ardour factor. It’s a romance-with-this-plant factor.”
Paz and his household planted olive bushes on 2 hundred acres in Artesia Wells, simply north of Laredo, in 2012. The land had been in Paz’s spouse’s household for generations, and the household wished to do one thing extra attention-grabbing than elevating cattle or rising watermelons. What started as an experiment shortly turned an obsession. “Olive oil is within the Bible. We created this; our palms, our individuals, our information made it,” Paz says. “We made this inexperienced gold.” All of the issues that make rising olives in Texas difficult—excessive temperatures, drought, and deluges—are in the end captured within the oil, he says, giving it a posh taste profile, buttery with a kick on the finish.
In 2021, when Paz heard {that a} freeze was coming, he did every part he might to guard his orchard. He irrigated closely to insulate the bushes and employed helicopters to fly over the orchard and push down hotter air. Texana’s bushes survived. However three years and as many freezes later, the bushes have but to supply any olives.
The shortage of manufacturing has compelled growers to import olives from elsewhere to remain in enterprise. After I talked to Paz, he was in Santa Margarita, California, harvesting olives. Texana has lengthy operated an unbiased harvesting firm that contracts with growers throughout the nation. By 2022, with the oil provide exhausted, Paz began working with growers in California’s Central Valley to reap and mill olives to promote below Texana Manufacturers. The enterprise modified its labels and product descriptions. “We’re nonetheless a Texas firm,” Paz says. He’s clear that importing oil—even oil comprised of olives he mills and harvests himself—is a stopgap till the bushes begin bearing fruit once more. If yet one more 12 months passes and not using a crop, he says, it’ll be time for some powerful conversations about the way forward for the orchard. “I’ll all the time be within the business,” he says. “We simply won’t farm olives in Texas.”
In 2020, on the peak of the olive growth, Janak estimates nearly 2 hundred producers had been cultivating olives on 3,500 acres. Final 12 months he despatched a survey to sixty olive growers. Twenty % stated they’d determined to not develop olives anymore.
Anybody who’s nonetheless promoting olive oil in Texas has imported the olives from someplace else, says Michael Walzel, the president of the Texas Affiliation of Olive Oil. The “GO TEXAN” label that adorns most Texas olive oil bottles—a program of the Texas Division of Agriculture to advertise Texas-made merchandise—requires solely that an organization has added worth to a product in Texas (for instance, by bottling or flavoring the olive oil).
Many producers have been clear about this transformation. Lone Star Olive Ranch, one of many first business orchards within the state, misplaced practically 14,000 bushes in the course of the 2021 freeze. “It’s going to take time for our bushes to develop and fruit,” wrote Cathy Bernell and Christine McCabe, the homeowners, on the corporate’s web site. “Till then, all of our oils will come from groves we handle or . . . immediately course of for in California.” (Bernell didn’t reply to an interview request.)
Based in 2016, the Texas Affiliation of Olive Oil as soon as counted fifty members. Right now the membership has roughly halved, Walzel says. A retired chemical engineer, Walzel took over as president of the affiliation earlier this 12 months, after 5 of seven board members left the business and resigned their seats. “Regardless of the entire lack of olives within the state of Texas for the final two years, the fortitude and willpower proven by Texas olive growers have triggered the need of an lively and visual Affiliation,” wrote Bernell, then the board’s president, in an April letter. “Though the Affiliation by no means actually went idle, we’re able to re-establish and work hand in hand with all Texas olive growers within the restoration and resurgence of the Texas Olive Trade.”
Earlier than 1985, few People consumed olive oil in any actual amount. That 12 months, a researcher on the College of Texas printed a research within the Journal of Lipid Analysis that demonstrated the well being advantages of monounsaturated fat, like these present in olive oil. “We started to reinvestigate olive oil some years in the past as a result of within the Mediterranean, olive oil is consumed in giant quantities and there’s no proof that it’s dangerous,” Scott Grundy, the UT professor, instructed the Washington Submit in 1989. “Actually, individuals in southern Italy and Crete, the place olive oil is consumed closely, appear to be very wholesome. They’ve only a few coronary heart assaults and never an extreme quantity of most cancers.”
Because the well being advantages turned clear, olive oil consumption in the USA skyrocketed, greater than quadrupling between 1990 and 2020. “The rationale that individuals initially bought into olive oil in Texas was it was a promising market,” Paz says. Solely 5 % of the olive oil consumed in the USA is produced domestically. Most of these olives had been initially grown in California’s Central Valley, with its Mediterranean local weather of dry summers and funky winters. The primary olive bushes had been planted in Texas within the mid-Nineties, however it wasn’t till 2010 that the business actually took off. By then, a couple of producers had demonstrated that olives might be a viable crop in Texas. In 2007, Texas Olive Ranch, in Carrizo Springs, had pressed the primary business oil within the state.
However even earlier than the 2021 freeze, growers struggled to adapt olives to Texas. “We’re rising a really, very Mediterranean crop in some of the continental climates,” Paz says. “Olives don’t like numerous rain. Nicely, some locations in Texas it rains 100 and twenty inches a 12 months. Olives don’t like erratic temperature. Nicely, it’s ninety on Christmas and it’s unfavourable 13 in February.”
Olive bushes develop finest in a form of Goldilocks zone, the place it’s each cold and warm, however not too scorching, and positively not too chilly. Like most stone fruit bushes, olive bushes require a sure variety of chill hours, often at temperatures starting from 35 to 40 levels, with the intention to flower and set fruit. However the bushes can’t survive very lengthy when the temperature dips under freezing. Accordingly, most olive growers in Texas are concentrated in a band stretching from north of Austin, close to School Station, to south of San Antonio, close to Carrizo Springs. “In Texas, at nighttime, it will get darkish. In every single place else at nighttime, it will get darkish and chilly,” Paz says. “And you actually must have these chill hours being uninterrupted to supply the way in which that it’s essential produce to run a viable olive-growing enterprise.”
Walzel planted his first three thousand bushes in an orchard close to Navasota in 2020. These bushes flourished in the course of the summer season and fall—after which died in the course of the freeze in February 2021. Undeterred, he planted new saplings once more the next summer season. They froze that winter. In 2022 he thought—“This can be my 12 months.” Once more, he watched as frost strangled all three thousand bushes. “My spouse thinks I’m loopy, if the definition of madness is doing the identical factor time and again and anticipating completely different outcomes,” he says. This 12 months, he’s diversified, planting grapes alongside a scaled-back orchard of 4 hundred olive bushes. However like many growers, he’s not prepared to surrender on olives.
Most olive bushes grown in Texas are arbequina, a drought-resistant Spanish varietal. Janak wonders if there’s a cultivar higher suited to Texas’s excessive climate. As a result of olives are a number of the oldest cultivated crops on this planet, there are a whole lot of sorts, every one tailored to barely completely different situations. In 2015, researchers at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension planted nineteen olive varieties on check plots and farms throughout the state. Now Janak is working to determine a brand new selection trial, this time specializing in two qualities: freeze resistance and chill requirement. “I believe there’s two ways in which we go along with olives in Texas,” he says. “Both we repair the freeze downside by a brand new cultivar or some administration approach that we haven’t found out but, or we transfer them south, away from the freeze downside. However after we try this, we lose the chilling that’s wanted to make them set fruit. So we’ve got to discover a selection that has an actual low chilling requirement.”
It’s additionally doable that olives are just too dangerous—too unreliable—to develop at a business scale in Texas. That was made clear final week, when a deep freeze gripped many of the state. “The outlook for an opportunity at really producing any olive fruit in Texas in 2024 seems to be bleak as soon as once more,” Janak says. “It definitely might occur, and I’m holding my breath that a few of them will make it by way of, however the odds should not good.”
Sooner or later, Paz says, he may need to confess: “They don’t plant strawberries in Lubbock, Texas, for a purpose, and perhaps you don’t plant olives in South Texas for a purpose. I’m not fairly there but, although,” he says. He suggests a title for this story: “Texas Olive Oil: The Slippery Romance.”
“There’s nothing like standing across the mill at harvest time and smelling recent tons of olives being crushed proper in entrance of you, then tasting the recent oil,” Janak says. You do that after, he says, and also you’re hooked. “The oldsters which might be rising olives had a very good summer season,” Walzel says. “However summer season isn’t our problem right here in Texas. It’s all the time the wintertime.”
