Permaculture principles on olive grove, will it work?

Hey guys,

I would like to start working with a family olive grove.

Everyone here plows the land. When I talk about no dig, people look as if I said something crazy. Everyone is certain it won't work.
The land here is heavily eroded, with very low organic content.

I was also thinking of burying prunings (people here normally burn the branches after pruning).

We have very dry conditions for almost 10 months of the year. The trees are not irrigated.
Has anyone applied permaculture principles on an olive grove succesfully (in the Mediteranean region) ?

Bumping this thread back to the top, in hopes someone with local experience might reply.  I don't see why permaculture principles wouldn't be viable in an olive grove.  I'd also suggest adding this question to the regional section of the permies forums, so you can ask people who have specific Mediteranean experience who will have better knowledge.

We have a similar climate temperature wise here, but the huge difference is that we get rainfall all year round. Summers do tend to be drier and we can go 4-6 weeks with little or no rain in the hottest part, so that's kind of Mediterranean. Olives are grown commercially in this region and the orchards have a pasture or ley understory. Most growers graze sheep to keep the grass low, although some will go at it with a mower. I've never seen an orchard here that was tilled.

Even though the prevailing tradition in some regions is to till for weed control and (according to some practitioners) reduce moisture loss, it's extremely damaging to the soil life and carbon reserves, and hence harms the fertiliy. The other main effect over time is elimination of structure, which creates compaction, loss of aeration, and reduced water infiltration. So when it does finally rain, there's more runoff and erosion.

I understand that this is a culturally embedded practice, but if you can buck the trend by demonstration, by all means do it. Letting grasses and herbs grow will provide shade and reduce evaporation, even when the plants die off or go dormant for the summer. The root mass and surface litter will hold the soil together when it rains, and help increase the organic matter. These factors will promote all the things you want to see in living soil: more nutrients, more critters, and more tunnels for water to penetrate deeply where it will do some good.

The prunings can be made into biochar to do even more good for the soil.

Example of how olives are grown by a friend of mine

I've been working with Huhana to make biochar from the huge amount of prunings from the trees. Part of the biochar gets spread back on the orchard and we're using the rest to clean up the stream.

Welcome to the forum!

This post talks about growing Narcissus/ Daffodils in their olive gardens in Turkey.

Plant comfrey, rosemary, and lavender to make it look more pleasing, and thyme and type of Mesembryanthemum.

Also, there is talk of incorporating goats into olive tree orchards.

https://permies.com/t/85067/Growing-Olive-Trees#702531

Sounds like my kind of area!

This is a photo I took a couple of days ago on a neighbouring olive grove.



My olives are mostly further away from the house so I don't grow intensively near them. The first thing I would do in your situation is to stop ploughing everything up. If you mow the grass short  then people will grudgingly accept that it might be ok and might stop hassling you to plough it. We do that and then just leave the grass to rot down in situ unless we need it for mulching somewhere else. We've planted seed-grown apricots and almonds up in our grove, and also medronho and prickly pear. When we prune, we usually heap the branches somewhere that could use a bit of protection and added nutrients and leave them there until the leaves have all fallen off, then gather the sticks for winter fuel.

Start small. Me and my brother both learned from my dad. He stuck to dads way 100%. So the generational thing is hard to overcome. I’m going to pat myself on the head and say I’m better than both of them now. My middle brother has little to no influence from dad and does things very similar to me although his wife could be the one pushing the organic train over there.

All that being said maybe just ask if you can manage a section yourself and while it takes a while to see improvement it’s not an insane amount of time. I’ve lived on my property for 3years and could see improvement in one year and dramatic improvement in years 2-3.

I will say that it’s much easier to improve the smaller sections though. My fields are still a work in progress and grass and things look a lot better by my opinion and neighbors / family. The soil is a long game. I can’t woodchip 15acres of field lol.

Little things start adding up and then one day you just notice out of nowhere that things have improved. If you prove on your section that it working you have a chance to win them over. Make sure and count the expenses you don’t have like fuel for plowing or fertilizers etc. My feed store old timer has a saying. When it hits the @ss pocket you pay attention.

Plowing is the worst thing you can do. Erosion is one thing, second the trees rely on their fine root system near the surface to catch the morning dew.  What happens when you rip them?
I think they just do it because it always have been done that way as every generation had to work with a dense powered soil after winter rain. It's the reason itself why it's done.
I haven't plowed for 4 years and the results are incredible!

I don't know squat about olive groves but I did see a video on using retired chickens to revitalize an old olive grove:

I saw a video awhile back about a regenerative olive grower in Greece who just mowed the grass and put the clippings under the trees. He retained a lot more moisture that way.

As for the branches,  I feel your pain. My in-laws grow about 1000 acres of cherries and burn all the old  trees that they pull up. If you can afford a wood chipper, then just chip it all and put it under the trees. If not,  have a designated brush pile and just let it decompose,  some day you'll grow the world's finest lavender on that spot.

I do experiment this year too, at least with some trees, which also got fresh mulch this year. I got a grass mower with basket for free and tried it out.
I d rather prefer to put the clippings on the chipped mulch compost to get it fired up for some reasons, but when the basket is full next to an olive, I felt happy to dump it there.
Be aware though, that long grass cuttings attract mice to live nearby.. They can cause terminal root damage to young trees.
The clippings also rot very fast. Within 3 weeks it's gone /over grown.so it's kind of a question if it's worth the time.

I took over an olive grove in Portugal, and yeah, the soil was mostly bare clay that was cooked by the sun, with low/nonexistent organic matter content, and some tufts of grass here and there.
We also don't get rain for a long time here, not quite 10 months, but 6-7 months of summer have no rain and temps up to 45 degrees.

I tried a bunch of different things, and I'd say that in my experience, cover crops are by far the best thing you can do.

Bringing in a million tons of mulch might have faster results, but it's not actually very realistic in most cases.

Planting trees, and even most shrubs simply did not work without quite a lot of added mulch and irrigation during the first summer. And even with irrigation I had quite a few losses.

During our short rainy season, the clay floods, and it tends to be a bit of a swimming pool.
Oats and rye grow well in the cold while flooded, and since there the soil isn't just lacking in organic matter but also has pretty much no nitrogen, I also sowed pulses like peas and broadbeans.
While nothing else really seemed to work, that worked great, and it was cheap and low effort.

for one hectare, 35 euros spent on a 25kg bag of rye, a 25kg bag of oats, and a 25kg bad of broadbeans thrown by hand onto the soil with 0 prior preparation of the soil, just before the automn rains arrived.
It germinates, grows during winter, and then you scythe/mow it down for the summer when it's dry anyway. (here we have to cut to comply with local regulations)

Now instead of having bare clay where nothing grows, I have a beautiful lush green field.
comparison with and without cover crops
 
You can see on the pic that after just 2 years, it look fundamentally different from the neighbor's land.

Now that the soil profile has moved along a bit, and I'm starting to see more perennials appear, and so I should be able to plant shrubs with more success, but I'm waiting another year.

I don't think that there is any easier or cheaper way to add huge amounts of organic matter to your land than spending 35 euros on a bag of rye, a bag of oats, and some broadbeans. I got the cheapest stuff I could find, so it was marketed as animal feed, not for sowing, but it worked fine anyway.

Wow Pascal - that picture speaks a thousand words - good start! I guess timing is everything when you have big seasonal changes in rainfall.

For comparison, i'm also adding a picture of part of the land where I've done nothing at all, and another part of the land where I threw some rye and oats.
Without the constant grazing and plowing, even the untouched part looks a bit better than the neighbor's land: there are a couple of tufts of bunchgrass that have regrown, and after a couple of years there is starting to be a tiny layer of weeds.
But most of the soil is still bare, and the pioneer weeds are not really adding all that much organic matter as they don't even manage to cover the soil with a single layer of fresh leaves.

In places where the rye and oats were sown, the tufts of bunchgrass are still there, but everything else filled out with lush green growth, lots more organic matter being produced, enough to cover the soil entirely after the first season