Deep soils tend to produce excessively vigorous trees, again 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 also be employed to reduce alternate bearing of trees, to encourage production throughout the tree canopy, and to produce sufficient shoot growth for next year s flowering and fruiting. Olives bear on last year s shoot growth, which is stunted while in competition with an excessively heavy fruit load.
Olive harvest is one of the most expensive operations in the orchard.
Many growers try to shake, rake, or beat the olives off the trees onto tarps or nets in an attempt to reduce harvest costs. To produce the valued extra-virgin oils, high quality fruit is crushed in either stone grinders or metal hammermills. 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. The olive juice, which contains both water and oil, is then separated in cream-type centrifuge separators, finally yielding the liquid gold.