DEVINE, Texas -- Italy it's not.
But Dallas oilman and neophyte farmer Trigg Dealey, against the advice of a seasoned Texas A&M horticulturist, is determined to grow olives on the Hill Country's southern fringe as if it were the rich central Italian farmland of Perugia. Dealey intends to make olive oil with his crop, hoping to tap into a huge domestic market that relies almost entirely on European imports.
"I want to start an industry," he says. Good luck, says A&M's George Ray McEachern, who has studied olive trees. He predicts Dealey's venture will fail. Growing olives, McEachern says, requires warm days and cool nights. In South Texas, the nights are too warm, he says. To the north, in Central Texas, the nights are cool but the risk of freeze is too great.
"I love olive trees," says McEachern. "Every Catholic church should have some. But we ought not to be growing them in Texas commercially." Dealey dismisses McEachern as "some quirky professor guy with a pecan agenda." Experts at Texas A&M have expressed similar skepticism about wine, apples and pears -- all of which are thriving Hill Country industries as farmers over the years have looked for new ways to use land once reserved almost exclusively for cattle.
Will olives be the Hill Country's next alternative agriculture success story?
Dealey is betting on it. He recently joined forces with Italian researchers to introduce a new genetic line of olive tree designed to increase planting density and raise potential yield. Though he only has about 150 test trees growing in Devine, south of San Antonio, Dealey predicts he and a handful of olive growers will have 1.5 million producing trees across Southwest Texas within 10 years. The goal, of course, is U.S. market share. And who can fault him?
Olive oil sales grew from 9.25 million gallons in 1989 to 12 million gallons in 1993, according to the American Olive Oil Association. Between 1982 and 1993, imports of olive oil almost quadrupled. Americans are learning what Italians have known for years: Olive oil is healthy -- and tasty. Californians are producing it. So, asks Dealey, why not Texans?
"There's considerable demand," says Dealey. "Even if all 275 million Americans wanted olive oil, we alone couldn't provide it." Dealey, an aficionado of Italian food, has nurtured his olive -growing dream for years. Then, in the late 1980s, he read a study by McEachern revealing that large areas of Southwestern Texas showed "temperature patterns similar to those where the olive is cultivated." But when Dealey asked the A&M horticulturist if his findings meant Texas should start an olive oil industry, McEachern responded with an unequivocal "no." "He told me point-blank olive oil would never be a commercial crop," says Dealey.
For his part, McEachern says, he was just doing his job. Texas A&M, the horticulturist says, has never encouraged commercial risk taking, particularly with crops not native to Texas. "Mr. Dealey wants to find an olive that can make it and that's good," says McEachern. "But according to what we know, he's running a risk. We have to tell him that or we're not doing our job." McEachern based his advice on his study which, using weather data from the Department of Defense, established a climatological composite for growing olives. Technically, parts of Texas fit the composite. But the study revealed that where olive trees grow well, they tend not to bear fruit because the nights are too warm. And where they bear fruit, the trees can freeze.
Dealey went to the Texas Department of Agriculture, which sent him to see Baxter Adams, an apple grower in Medina whose Love Creek Orchards is home to 150,000 dwarf apple trees. There Dealey learned that McEachern had discouraged Adams from growing apples, once telling him they could not be grown commercially in Texas. Emboldened, Dealey persevered. Then in 1992 Loy Shreve, a former A&M agricultural agent in Uvalde, led him to several olive trees near Eagle Pass that locals claim have been producing fruit for decades. What's more, they survived several freezes.
"I think it's worth a try," Shreve told Dealey. In addition to his orchard in Devine, Dealey planted some 40 olive trees south of Austin two years ago. But he lost all of those to cold weather. Still, he has identified three areas he believes to be good for growing olives: just south of Austin on the Balcones Escarpment, in Dimmit County southeast of Eagle Pass, and between Uvalde and Del Rio.
Dealey is betting that American consumers will become more discerning about their olive oil, choosing quality U.S. brands over low-quality Italian products that are said to be dumped on the U.S. market. What few consumers know, Dealey says, is that top-selling Italian brands use low-grade oil from places such as Tunisia, then add flavor to it for export. "People perceive Italian oil to be better than it really is," he says. "The risk Italy is running is that consumers are going to find out what's really in their oil."
Italian experts are saying the same thing. One -- Giuseppe Fontanazza of Perugia's Center for National Research -- told the Rome daily Il Messaggero in February that the Italian olive oil industry is vulnerable. Fontanazza told the newspaper that Dealey's bid to grow olives in Texas merits "a revolutionary movement bargaining for the exclusivity of America."
Even Dealey admits that may be a stretch. But he is thinking big. With his petroleum and real estate concerns on hold, Dealey already has formed the Texas Olive Oil Council with Adams and another colleague. Still, Dealey is at least a year away from harvesting a Texas olive . Pressing the olives to make oil is sure to present additional challenges, among them the high cost of getting rid of the waste. "I think he will find that economically he can't compete," says Louise Ferguson, a horticulturist at the University of California at Davis.
Dealey agrees that competing with the Europeans is a longshot. But he would be satisfied to create a Hill Country niche, challenging the California growers and their tiny market share. And maybe -- just maybe -- Dealey could prove an Aggie horticulturist wrong in the process.
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