Olive Farming: What Happens Before the Harvest

Every October I go back to València, to the groves where Valèvida is grown, to help choose the olives that become that year's bottle.

The mill gets most of the attention when people talk about olive oil quality. But almost everything that determines what ends up in the bottle is decided earlier, in the grove, months before any olive is pressed.

A Native Cultivar, Not an Import

Valèvida comes from Grossal, an olive variety native to a pocket of inland València nicknamed "La Toscana Valenciana." It isn't a cultivar bred for high yield or shipped in from somewhere it doesn't belong — it's what has grown in that soil for generations. More on Grossal here →

No Irrigation, On Purpose

The groves are rain-fed only — no irrigation system at all. That's not a limitation the farmers work around; it's how olive trees have grown in that region for as long as anyone's farmed there. A tree that has to work for its water grows differently than one that never has to.

Farming Around the Weather

Harvest timing isn't just about ripeness. The crew also watches the weather closely and waits for a dry stretch, because olives picked wet or in the wrong conditions get damaged before they ever reach the mill.

So the calendar sets the general window, ripeness narrows it, and the weather picks the actual morning. Some years that means waiting longer than planned.

Small and Known, Not Large and Anonymous

Valèvida is sourced from a small family cooperative in that pocket of inland València — the kind of operation where the people farming the trees are the same people who'll tell you when the harvest was hard. That's different from how a lot of extra virgin olive oil gets made, where fruit from many growers across a wide region is pooled together before anyone presses it, and no single grove is really accountable for what comes out.

Nothing Goes to Waste

During harvest, the leaves that come off with the olives are separated out and given to local cattle as feed. It's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing that only happens when a harvest is small enough for someone to be paying attention to every part of it.

Read more: How Extra Virgin Olive Oil Is Made →