Harvest outlook
Harvest outlook In our annual round-up of the harvest outlook around Australia and New Zealand, in this edition we see how the season is looking in Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia. As usual, where possible we’ve revisited the growers we spoke with last year to see how this year compares. Queensland Edina Olives, Gin Gin Neville and Lucy Smith have had a seriously rough trot as olive growers. When we caught up with them last year they’d had no commercial crop for the previous seven years and had been battling rampant olive lace bug for the last two. Pruning to eradicate the pest saw good regrowth but the bugs returned while the fruit did not. So they came to the conclusion that Queensland’s climate is no longer amenable to olive growing, and decided to continue tending just a fraction of their 1600 “beautiful and healthy” but non-fruiting trees. Unfortunately, even concentrating the TLC on a small part of the grove hasn’t resulted in a crop this year. “We’ve got no olives at all. We have 144 trees that I conserved, that we were taking a lot of care with, and even those this year didn’t produce one flower,” Neville said. “They had everything you could possibly give an olive tree: I did soil tests and fertilized them, we irrigated twice a week until the water level started to get low, and we had a winter chill – a couple of mornings down to minus 6 and minus 8 on the ground – but still produced nothing.” The culprit this year was, like for so many others, the ongoing drought across some parts of Queensland. “It wasn’t the nutrients and wasn’t the winter chill so that doesn’t leave much more than moisture as the problem,” Neville said. “The last time we had rain was June, with just a few millimetres here and there since, and all the vegetation is dead or dying. Maybe what was what was wrong with the olives was that the irrigation we gave them of 70L twice a week didn’t really work because the ground moisture wasn’t high enough. We just don’t know.” What they do know, though, is that olive lace bug don’t like hot, dry conditions. “They like the humidity,” Neville said. “Since we’ve had this extremely dry weather, they did come around in October like they usually do but only on a small scale. Then in March I expected them to do the same thing but again, it was only minimal. So the weather does have a lot to do with it. “I haven’t sprayed them, though, so they’ll all be hiding under there ready to come out next year.” Despite all of that, the Smiths somehow continue to be philosophical about the situation and have no intention of giving up olives completely. “I can’t keep my fingers out of the dirt so I’m going to keep going with my 144 trees - you never know your luck in a big country,” Neville said. “And they’re saying now that Arbequina are the ones that do the best in Queensland, so I might put in a trial patch of Arbequina and see what happens. “As I see it, everybody growing olives up here should treat it as a trial.” 14 • Australian & New Zealand Olivegrower & Processor • March 2019 • Issue 111
Gin Gin Palm Tree Darlington
The Bradfield Scheme During Olivegrower’s discussions with Neville he raised the issue of water diversion, creating infrastructure to move the floodwaters in northern Queensland inland to the channel country and beyond. He raised the concept of a modified version of the Bradfield Scheme, connecting the north Queensland rivers and linking them to the Darling/Murray. “It’ll fix up the problems with the Murray Darling system and open up large areas of Queensland and northern New South Wales for agriculture. It’d become the food bowl of Australia,” he said. “It’s definitely feasible and with what’s happening right now floods in one part of the state and drought in the other - it needs to be a priority.” Something to contemplate … Rash Valley Olives, Palm Tree The 2016 harvest saw the last ‘reasonable’ crop in Roger and Shirley Harrison’s grove. Continuing drought has left them unable to irrigate - and moisture stress leading up to flowering and fruit-set has given them little fruit to nurture anyway. So while much of northern Queensland is reeling from floods, the Harrisons are in the same boat as the Smiths. “Our total rainfall for January was 6mm, and we got 50mm last week (mid-February) while Northern Queensland was awash. It’s pretty dry here at the moment,” Roger said. “And as for olives, we’ve reached the end of the line! “We’ve had another failed crop this year, making it two in a row, following two extremely dry winters. We’ve also had no run-off into our dam for around six years now, so we’re really pushing it uphill. So (being ever so fast to catch on) I’ve concluded olives are the wrong thing to try to grow in a non-Mediterranean climate.” They’ve also made a similar decision to the Smiths about the future of their grove. “To cut down on the workload - mainly pruning, but also pest and weed control, etc - we’ll rip out most of the trees (we can’t leave them unattended!) and keep just a hundred or so for our own supply of olives. “We’re also selling our press to a buyer in South Australia and, should we ever get a half-decent crop, we’ll find someone with a press to extract the oil for us. “Shirley’s been keen to give up for a while now, but I’m the everoptimistic one who kept saying ‘Next year will be better’. But you can only bash your head against a brick wall for so long ...” And while he’s undoubtedly taken a turn towards pragmatism, the ever-present optimism we’ve seen from Harrison over the years hasn’t completely disappeared. “I am keeping one of our 500 litre floating lid tanks, a couple of