From Grove to Community:
Making a Difference
Making a Difference
Is a rigorous and meaningful process that involves rescuing abandoned olive groves overlooked due to market pressures or generational neglect.
Sustaining an olive grove protects the trees from neglect, preventing abandonment, and ensuring they stay productive for many future harvests.
Through active involvement, we turn these rescued groves into hubs of sustainability, education, and shared prosperity.
Our rejuvenate phase is a commitment that extends to ensuring the healthy growth of each olive.
Abandoned groves often turn into impenetrable forests, posing hydrological and fire risks to the community and becoming a paradise for invasive species. This invasive growth suffocates the trees, robbing them of energy and making it challenging for us to locate them within the grove.
It requires a substantial investment of time and resources combining revitalizing trees and land for sustainable, ethical, high-quality olive oil production. It involves tree health assessment, eco-friendly soil enrichment, integrated pest management through sustainable farming practices.
We clean up the olive trees and use different pruning techniques to help the plants regain energy, and we later shape them (polyconic or monoconic pruning) in a way that heals and energizes the plant while facilitating our harvest process. It’s a symbiotic relationship between the trees, the land, and the people.
Keeping a grove alive and flourishing is far more manageable than reviving it from abandonment.
Once a grove is rejuvenated, it enters our sustain phase, leading up to the harvest. This ensures that a once-abandoned grove not only recovers, but also thrives and remains productive for numerous harvests, offering benefits to you, the local producer, and their community.
After the trees have regained their strength and come back into production, the meticulous and detailed pruning, maintenance, harvest, extraction, storage, and transport practices begin.
Annual maintenance is essential to prevent a grove from falling back into neglect.
We work with social cooperative COOP21 and have implemented two programs, ASTER and ASTER 2, to engage local communities in agricultural activities, fostering a sense of ownership and responsibility.
Although we have always practiced and continue to uphold environmentally sustainable methods, we partner with Olivares Vivos to monitor and enhance the biodiversity of our groves.
Additionally, our One Tree One Bottle program and the local supply chain in our groves' community ensure sustainable business practices that provide fair income for farmers and workers.
Sustainable farming methods reduce carbon emissions and regenerate the land.
For every $1 received, 49 cents is returned to the immediate community to drive positive change, enhance product and land quality, and expand our mission.
Abandoned Grove is explicitly committed to serving local communities near our groves and within 80 km of our Toronto office.
We prioritize partnerships with these communities to strengthen local economies, support small businesses, and foster sustainability.
With 85% of our revenue coming from customers local to our headquarters, our ongoing mission is to build relationships that benefit the communities we proudly serve.