It appears that we are finally going to recover from our drought. The 2016 Olive season appears ready to be a good one for the production of oil. Temperatures in the Guadalupe River Valley, where our olive trees grow in Baja California, have been mild. We have had sufficient rainfall to allow the trees to be recovering. The result is the new growth of olives pictured below.
These olives will require the entire summer to continue to grow and ripen. Typically in our part of the world, olive harvesting occurs in late December. However, this year it likely will occur earlier.
This expected higher volume of olives will allow us to finally start up our new olive oil machinery. Pictured below is the new olive oil press, one component of the new machinery. This machine will permit the high speed separation of the oil from the vegetable solids such as olive skin.
During the 2014 and 2015 season’s the drought and the heat severely limited our production forcing the new machinery to be kept idle while we continued using our original method of olive oil extraction — in our freeze-dryer under vacuum.
This freeze-dryer can process 400 kgs of olives ever 24 hours. This sort of volume was fine during the drought years when the production was low. However, the new equipment will be able to process 500 kgs/hour.
The advantage of Seagate producing over 40 products is that we are not dependent upon any single one, especially those susceptible to drought. But it also takes away time from being able to escape and dive among the corals in places like the Cayman Islands. Pictured below is a closeup of a hard coral know as a tube coral, which is found throughout the warm-water tropical regions of the world. So far it has been resistant to global warming and the slow acidification of the oceans.
