From the Fields - Brooke Hazen

By Brooke Hazen, Sonoma County apple and olive farmer

From a purely financial perspective, it’s great to have apple season start again. We started in late July with early varieties. Now we’re starting Honey Crisp harvest, our main variety. About 90% of what I grow are Honey Crisp and Fuji, and 10% are heirloom apples. August and September are the heavy harvest months for us. When we finish apples the first week of October, we start custom crushing olives (for oil) for other growers. Then we will begin our own olive harvest in mid-November. It’s a really nice flow.

For us in the coastal-influenced areas, the olives, which are alternate-bearing, are “on” this year. It would be an “off” year for the more inland areas. I have 21 varieties. Mine are high-density plantings, 15-by-15 feet. They’re freestanding, not trellised. We do a hybrid harvest where it’s not an over-the-row harvester. It’s battery-backpack operated pneumatic combs that oscillate and rake the olives off the trees onto shade cloth on the ground.

I have a Rapanelli press that does 2 tons per hour. We custom crush for about 100 customers as well as our own. We end up crushing about 250 tons of olives per year, and that’s slowly growing over time. The business is still quite young. I started this farm in 2000, and I’ve had the press for about nine years. Everything is still evolving.

One of the most exciting evolutions I’ve been doing since the pandemic is going direct to customer a lot more. Now a sizable portion of our product is going to our own retail shop at the press. We do olive oil tastings and apple tastings. Selling direct has been financially great and very satisfying for me as a grower. I call it bringing the culture back to agriculture, reconnecting with the consumer. Now I get to meet them firsthand, and I get to hear how much they enjoy it, and they get to learn about the farm.