Back in January I wrote a column about locally produced olive oils, especially Dixon’s own Jovia Farms, which produces Jovia Groves olive oil (use the search word Jovia to find that article).

I got myself invited back for this year’s olive harvest, which must come at about the tail end of all the various fruit harvests in the valley. This year’s harvest was later than usual because of a cooler summer which prolonged the ripening of the olives. Normally, the harvest would come around three weeks earlier.

I drove out east of town on November 19 to photograph one of the final days of the harvest. Jon and Sylvia Fadhl, the owners, grow short olive trees that are close together and in rows so the Fadhls can harvest using a a modified grape picker. It works by shaking the trees and branches so the fruit falls off. Unfortunately, this method currently only collects about 60 percent of the olives on the trees, but it still earns the Fadhls more money than if they had to pay for expensive harvesting by hand.

The olives are taken to an olive-pressing operation in Oroville to create the oil.

The olives you’ll see in these photos will be both green and red. The red ones, which I assume are riper, contain the most oil, but the green ones have substances that help preserve the eventual oil’s freshness.

The soil on this farm has a lot of clay in it, and the farm uses irrigation water from the Sacramento River. Jovia Farms works with 9,000 trees which last year yielded 17 tons of olives.