SACRAMENTO — California is hoping to regain a seat at the table when it comes to table olives, which was once a leading industry in the state.
Dennis Burreson has been growing table olives for 40 years.
“We used to enjoy a significant amount of the institutional marketplace. The pizza trade but we’ve lost 90% of it,” Burreson said.
He says labor costs him half of his total revenue. It’s one of the reasons production statewide is down from 37,000 acres when he started to just above 12,000 now. UC Davis professor Louise Ferguson has spent her career studying why.
“The table olive industry is hand harvesting and hand pruning costs,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson is also looking into what to do about it and how to make it more economically feasible.
“Because the climate in California is really good for table olives and with the increasing water problems and with the fact they can take class two – that’s a gravelly poor quality soil – they are an ideal crop for some of the situations that are coming climatically in California,” Ferguson said.