Deep soils tend to produce excessively vigorous trees, also with lower yields. The ideal site for olive oil production is a clay loam soil with good internal and surface drainage. Irrigation is necessary to produce heavy crops and avoid alternate bearing. Regular pruning should be employed to reduce alternate bearing of trees, to encourage production throughout the tree canopy, and to produce sufficient shoot growth for the next year's flowering and fruiting. Olives bear on the previous year's shoot growth, which is shunted while in competition with an excessively heavy fruit load.
Harvesting is one of the most expensive operations in an olive orchard.
Many growers try to shake, rake, or beat the olives off the trees onto tarps or nets to reduce harvest costs. To produce the valued extra-virgin oils, high quality fruit is crushed in either stone grinders or metal hammer mills. The paste is then mixed until oil droplets form, and pressed in either single batch hydraulic presses or continuous flow spinning presses. One alternative is a machine that selectively removes the oil from the paste without pressing. In order to make a profit after all this, the oils are bottled into beautifully decorated etched and labeled containers of various sizes.