DILLEY, Texas -- The last time Trigg Dealey held a seminar on cultivating Texas olives, he took guests to a treeless orchard.
Just before the event five years ago, all of the olive trees on the tract outside San Antonio had to be cut to the ground after sustaining freeze damage. The incident seemed to underscore what experts, including one noted Texas A&M University horticulturist, proclaimed all along: Olives can't be grown comercially in Texas.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Dealey, executive director of the Texas Olive Oil Council, had something to show. On David and Beverly Anderson's ranch near this small town 70 miles southwest of San Antonio, Mr. Dealey led a tour through an orchard of 144 healthy olive trees with branches drooping from the weight of the fruit.
The Andersons, along with owners of another orchard new Eagle Pass, plan to begin processing the first Texas "extra virgin" olive oil here in September.
I'm announcing that the pioneering Texas olive growers have reached a milestone i their journey to establish olive cultivation in Texas," proclaimed Mr. Dealey, flanked by rows of dark-green, thick-trunked olive trees 15 to 20 feet high in the Anderson orchard.
Statewide, there are about a dozen growers with 7000 trees, many in a South Texas zone between Eagle Pass and the Hill Country.
Mr. Dealey traces his passion for olive oil to his youth, when his family frequented Perino's Italian Restaurant on Dallas' south side. And a family maid once told him that his hair was so shiny because his mother treated it with olive oil. "There seemed to be something mysterious about it," he said.
In the late 1970's, concerned about his family's history of heard disease, Mr. Dealey learned that olive oil would be a healthy substitute for butter and other fats. He made it a staple of his diet, and became a self-styled nutritionist while owning and managing real estate and investing in oil and gas.
In the early 1990's, he toured Italy with members of a California olive oil association. He learned that parts of Texas had a similar climate to that of central Italy, which produced the world's finest olive oil. And he began to wonder why it couldn't be produced here.
The United States imports almost all of the olive oil it consumes. In 1998, the most recent year for which data is available, the United States produced 4,100 tons of olive oil - but imported more than 181,881 tons, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Mr. Dealey's hopes initially were dashed when Texas A&M horticulturist Dr. George Ray McEachern advised him that growing olives in Texas was risky. He was told that the trees require cool nights, but not so cold that a freeze could kill them. He pressed ahead and grew 168 olive trees in partnership with Baxter Adams - who had successfully cultivated apples in the Texas Hill Country - in an orchard new Devine, southwest of San Antonio. In 1994, he formed the olive council to promote the oil.
The trees grew well. But the day before a cultivation seminar in 1996, freeze damage was discovered in the orchard, and all of the trees had to be cut to the ground. "We trucked all these people out there and there was nothing to look at," Mr. Dealey said. The Andersons, whose primary business is an auto repair shop in San Antonio, were at that seminar. Despite the disasterous outcome, they decided to plant some trees.
Mrs. Anderson, 63, said a wild olive tree had grown for years just behind their ranch house and"you can't hardly kill the thing." The couple did research with the help of mr. Dealey, who obtained a degree in olive cultivation and the chemistry of olive oil from the University of Ancona in Italy in 1998. Four years ago, she and her husband imported four varietites of olive trees from Italy and created an orchard on one acre not far from the house, It typically costs about $20 per tree to start an olive orchard.
Now, she said a combination of good weather and divine intervention - each tree was individually "blessed," she said - will result in a first harvest in September.
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