OLIVE farm Pure Tasmania Estate at Castle Forbes Bay is diversifying its farming operations this harvest by experimenting with a different fruit combination for olive oil.
The farm grows three types of olive trees, Frantoio, Barnea and Manzanillo on the 20ha property.
Owner Alex Fok has only ever used Frantoio olives for olive oil production but after picking this harvest, wants to try mixing Barnea and Manzanillos olives together – that are usually for eating – as a specialty oil.
Mr Fok said the fruit combination has never been done before on their farm but this harvest will be a lot about experimenting.
“I just want to try it and see what it’s like. You’ve always got to persevere and try something new and different,” he said.
“The fruits are also both ripe at the same time and that’s one challenge with olives – they all have to be ripe for pressing.
“It’s very difficult for the press to get optimum yield with different stages of ripeness.”
“The main reason is that our son being a chef, I’m more inclined to do something different and it’s also a challenge for him. As a chef he appreciates the quality of the product,” he said.
“We’ve only ever produced pure Frantoio olive oil because it’s classified as one of the best olive oils in the world, it keeps the best as well.
“Manzanillo olives are for eating and Barnea are used by chefs as a pure oil as it’s an interesting oil to cook with.”
Mr Fok said Barnea olives are a very interesting variety of olives to press as they are specialist olives that are pressed with lemon.
“It’s usually a very expensive process and you need to press them at the end of the pressing year because you need to strip the entire machine down as the lemons eat the stainless steel in the process,” he said.
Pure Tasmania Estate’s operation is very much very diversified with one part of the business being a mature olive tree operation and an established market in Japan for big volumes of Frantoio olive oil.
“We sell big volumes to Japan who pay big prices for it but the locals here aren’t going to pay around $35 for a small 250ml bottle of olive oil,” Mr Fok said.
“You really need to look at small olive oil producers as more of a hobby rather than a commercial venture.”
Pure Tasmania Estate sells its olive oil to particular clients with enough to keep for themselves until the next harvest.
“It’s special, once it’s gone it’s gone, and you might not get it back next year if you don’t get a good fruit set.
“We’re interested in high-quality fruit producing trees and if we get a poor year for fruit set, we don’t pick.”
Their olive trees are around 25 years old and are sold as a wholesale of 10 trees or more with individual trees available through Westland Nurseries at Seven Mile Beach.
The farm started with 700 olive trees before the mature olive tree business started. They now have about 400 trees left on the property.
Pulling out trees is a lengthy process and is an investment of six months or longer, but Mr Fok said they want to reduce the amount of trees they have and just focus on the quality.
They are hoping to cut down to just 150 high-production olive trees.
“We want to clear out the trees that aren’t productive.
“We started getting calls from architects in Melbourne, Brisbane and builders from around here who wanted to buy mature olive trees.”
Mr Fok said this part of the business was an exercise as it is a tricky and costly operation to pull the trees.
“It’s a very expensive process and can cost up to $10,000 per tree with excavations and transport as well to consider.”
The removal of trees is done over two stages with six months in between.
“The first stage, we get a digger in, and they trench the tree with a two-metre circumference around the tree.
“This trims the roots down on the tree that are running out.”
“After that, it stays in the ground for another six months and then we cut the canopy back.
“After six months we dig it out, this is so the tree is used to living with a reduced root ball.”
The farm has ready-to-dig-out trees with about 50 trees that have been trenched with their canopies trimmed.
They’ve established new olive groves at South Arm which bought 150 trees directly from their farm.
Mr Fok said this year’s harvest had a lot of fruits with all of their picks done in the recent weeks.
“We had our first olives pressed and the director of the press told us that our fruits were still really young, so we got a very low yield out of the fruit.”
Pure Tasmania Estate uses Cradle Coast Olives to get their olives pressed.
“The olive oil is absolutely amazing, but it is highly expensive to produce,” he said.
The cost of picking equals to being $1 per kg and the cost of pressing is $1 a kg with transport, the return on the fruit itself looks at a cost base of $3 a kg of fruit.
“If you pick a thousand kilos, which is what we did last week, the cost base of that is $3000 which only produced 65 litres of olive oil.”
“I mean it’s amazing olive oil, but you can see how expensive it is.”