Return to the Olive Farm (The Olive Series Book 4)

by Carol Drinkwater

  I wondered.

  Its discharge was safe for agricultural purposes, it further stated, and it was compatible with numerous other insecticides and fungicides. The product’s makers, however, declined to accept responsibility when it was used in conjunction with other products unless advice had been taken. An interesting caveat, I thought.

  Towards the lower section of the label, in small black lettering, I took a magnifying glass and read the following:

  Produit dangereux pour les abeilles et autres insectes pollinasateurs. Ne pas traiter pendant la floraison.

  Translated it warned, ‘this product is dangerous for bees and other pollinators’ (which would include butterflies as well as certain birds, wasps). ‘Do not use during the flowering season.’

  But the flowering season of which plants? There are flowers of one variety or another in blossom throughout the entire year. Olive flowers, appearing in April, are never sprayed. Their arrival precedes the drupe and the fly that lays its eggs in the drupe’s flesh. The drupe or olive appears a month or more after the flowers have died away.

  So, which flowers were the manufacturers referring to?

  Further research on my part brought forth other results that were even more perturbing. Dimethoate, the principal ingredient in this spray, disrupted the endocrine and nervous systems in both humans and animals. It caused infertility. It was sold as an insecticide to combat, to kill off fruit flies that inhabited asparagus, cherry, chicory etc. and olives, and its duration of efficacy was two to three weeks. At which point it was necessary to spray again. I considered my own childless state and shoved that thought immediately out of mind. I wondered about the nervous system of the honeybee. François had told me so long ago that bees were being wiped out because the network of cells within their systems that communicated navigational information was being damaged by contact with insecticides. This caused them to lose their ability to find their way back to their hives and, in their tireless attempts to make it to their dwelling, they wore themselves out and died.

  Residue of this product, dimethoate, on the fruits it had been used to ‘protect’ could not be simply washed away. This explained the reason why, of course, no harvesting was allowed until at least twenty-one days beyond the final coating of the season. Was the company responsible for this product, and possibly other products, unaware of the longer-term effects of their fly poison, or were they disregarding their responsibility towards the ecological systems that were being devastatingly disturbed by the use of concoctions such as theirs? I made a note of their name and address.

  The official argument was that twenty-one days after the liquid had been used it was no longer efficient. Consequently, twenty-one days after the ultimate spraying of the season all risk had been eliminated and the olives could be harvested without delivering any harmful effects. Of course, any pollinator waywardly frequenting an olive grove, happening by, busying herself feeding off rogue flowers during the time of spraying and beyond, had long since been done for. The product did not exclusively target the olive fly. Its efficiency was indiscriminate, non-selective.

  Two of the Portuguese returned, Francisco with his brother, crinkle-haired José. They met up with Michel, reconsidered the site, apologised for not having found a solution for the illegal roof sheets but agreed to be ‘more reasonable’ with their estimate than their competitor Bolmusso had been.

  Their quote was a little over fifty thousand euros. This remained beyond our range. However, after Michel telephoned and told them ‘No, thank you’ they began ringing us twice a day.

  ‘No, no, you haven’t understood, Monsieur, that is only an estimate. It is the price before the reduction. It is not the real price. We can discuss the real price.’

  I think we had forgotten this slice of Côte d’Azur life.

  Michel had long been in the habit of acting as a newscutting service to me because he felt I did not spend sufficient time reading the daily papers (which was true). Today’s I found on my desk, an article from Le Monde. It reported that the French agricultural minister, Michel Barnier, had informed his parliament that bee deaths were being confirmed in areas of France where the insecticide product Gaucho (and another known as Regent) had not been sprayed. The intimation being that neither Gaucho nor Regent could be held responsible for the current mass disappearance of French bee colonies.

  The beekeeping associations were losing their case. I tossed aside the article with a sense of anger and impotence.

  Were these reported deaths in areas of France where fruit orchards were farmed, where the crops were managed with chemicals? What could be done to help the bees? Of course, it was too late to assist François, our dear friend who had invested all his and his wife’s savings in his dream of hives and honey. They had found themselves victims of what was being described as a ‘mysterious international bee crisis’. But was it a mystery, or might that possibly be a high-level smoke-screen? And what of the prospects for our bankrupted friends in their retirement and for the future of the honeybee itself? A world without bees? Personally, I missed the company of all those furry little foragers flitting busily about our grounds and I was beginning to wake up to the fact that there were far fewer butterflies, songbirds, insects and pollinators frequenting the farm. My memory was that, during our first years, I was constantly surprised and delighted by sightings of yet another new creature, but they were less in evidence now.

  I drank my morning coffee, deliberating, and decided to contact the producers of dimethoate, whose registered offices were in Belgium. I looked them up on the internet and accessed their site, but to download or read any information involved the disclosure of a certain amount of personal information on my part: identity, purpose of my business, reason for contact, etc. This I offered and followed it by the subject of my enquiry: bees and the environment. An interesting caveat before SEND informed me that I had a right to protect or alter my personal information or object to it being forwarded to third parties, but in order to do that I was obliged to send in a written application to a given address in Paris. I decided not to bother and pressed SEND.

  We began gathering our olives in the second week of November. The fruits had ripened ahead of schedule, as had happened during the previous couple of seasons. It was becoming the norm, but I had not noticed any real expressions of concern within the agricultural community. I drove to the Var, stopping randomly to chat with olive growers, pickers, crofters, smallholders. I wanted to hear the millers’ opinions, too, but the majority were still closed. I was keen to sound out the general reaction to this gentle season displacement, to get an idea of how many mills were opening early to accommodate Nature’s cycle transition. Few of those I spoke to, folk out on their lands, appeared to be unduly worried, few mills were as yet turning. I found one ready to go. The prelude to the season of olive gathering has always historically been linked to the last week of November and most were sticking to that.

  ‘Why change?’ was the response I received. ‘This is abnormal. Things will be back to their regular ripening period next year.’

  ‘But our fruits,’ I argued to this farmer or that, ‘save for any lost crop, are encountering a third successive year of premature ripening.’

  ‘You know why, don’t you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You probably haven’t sprayed them hard enough. It’s essential to soak them in insecticides. That keeps them healthy.’

  ‘Does it?’

  Ours was a reasonable crop that autumn. On that score we had nothing to complain about and Quashia was happy that I had not denied him a harvest. We picked and gathered fast with nimble, experienced fingers to bring in a fresh yield, low in acidity. As was the tradition chez nous, I was the one to transport the fruits to the mill where the oil arrived, spluttering and gurgling like a newborn child, and its quality was good.

  Early December wiped her muddied feet on the mat and I was still shunting olives to the mill.

  ‘How are you doing?’ ‘Ho
w was your year?’ Standard questions for those who meet but once annually at the pressing station.

  During my penultimate appointment, a certain festive mood had taken over, warming the cold subterranean air where the exhalations of breath rose like smoke clouds and men cradled their wine glasses with gloved hands.

  ‘Not too bad. Can’t complain’ (which most usually did).

  ‘How was it at your place?’

  ‘Here, I brought a bottle of my own wine. Will you join me in a glass?’

  ‘Won’t say no, merci beaucoup.’

  I was by now pressing our third load of the year, while listening to these exchanges – three days’ pickings, fourteen crateloads, most of which had come from the lower groves, from the revered knobblies, givers of plump, oleaginous fruits – when I bumped into René and Raymond. Here they were together on that morning celebrating their weekly haul of a minimum of one ton of olives.

  Apropos of not very much (besides long-lost friendships and the enduring power of the olive), I was invited to share a bottle of rather splendid rosé with them. Even though it was only nine in the morning, we settled contentedly together to a glass or two, as is the habit on a wintry occasion while waiting for one’s fruits to be metamorphosed into luscious golden oil, and we fell into conversation about the state of the planet and, quite naturally, olive farming in particular. I knew well that René and Raymond were hardline conventionalists. Their thoughts were clearly set on their annual haul. For the world beyond their fences, they could not have given a hoot. Quantity was their boast and it almost matched their, it has to be said, exaggerated claims for the quality of the oil. Already this winter they had harvested five tons, or five thousand kilos of olives, and still had approximately twice the same quantity to go. We at Appassionata own three hundred trees, a dominance of which are juniors, and we usually shunt to the mill a total of around twelve hundred kilos of our purple-green drupes. Raymond, with all his recent plantings, owned close to three times our figure, including his juniors, yet his yields were thirteen or possibly fourteen times greater than ours. Their boast was that they had irrigated the fields on an almost daily basis. Old trees, young trees, it made no difference; each plant was being fed with phenomenal quantities of water pumped from Monsieur le Water Sorcerer’s trio of home-sunk wells. And on this particular morning I dared to pose a question that I knew would be a stick of dynamite within this crowd of farmers whose faces were the colour of baked bricks.

  ‘Raymond, even given that the water beneath your land is free, are you not just a little concerned about the overuse of natural H2o resources? After all, olive trees don’t require such a litreage of irrigation …’

  ‘Heavier watering produces heartier harvests.’ A recurring mantra of René’s these days, since he had gained liberal access to Raymond’s gushing wells. He poured some more wine, refilling all our glasses, but I could see he was not happy with where I was leading the conversation.

  ‘I was in Andalucía a little while ago and, while I was there, I had a conversation with a soil scientist.’ I did not allow the frowns gathering like bad-weather clouds across the foreheads of those present to intimidate me. ‘He was an intelligent, caring being, born of the earth with a grand lineage in olive farming and he expressed profound concern for the damage and erosions being wrought upon his southern Spanish soil. He talked of desertification—’

  ‘Desertification! What in God’s name is that?’ spluttered one bloke with sagging, turkey neck and a barrel chest.

  ‘It’s the reduction of fine farming earth to desert-like conditions, when the soil becomes arid and lacks all nutrients, including water.’

  ‘Let the Spanish worry about their own problems,’ rejoined. René. ‘There’s no likelihood of desert conditions here!’

  ‘Ha! Ha! A desert in Provence!’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘What a load of codswallop!’

  Hearing the outburst, two other farmers, younger men, shuffled closer. Another generation: perhaps a more modern approach? Both were dandling glasses of a local heavy-bodied Côte de Provence red, poured for them by Gérard, our mill owner, who was across the cold room bending and shunting, working non-stop to assure our loads were kept on the move, down the conveyor belt and into the crushing baskets.

  I yearned to share further concerns, to elucidate upon ample and rich discoveries of mine with these newcomers to the debate as well as with my old pals, René and Raymond, but I sipped my wine silently, deliberating. For well over a decade René and I had been in disagreement over our approach to olive farming and I itched to attempt just one more time to persuade him to think again, but he was recounting to the pair of farmers who had just joined our little circle the gist of our conversation. When he had finished, the two men looked my way, raised their eyes in contempt, muttered words such as ‘she’s nothing but a foreigner’ and, from the other, ‘and a woman’, and they turned their attention to Raymond, who was rather out of his depth in the bowels of the mill in his tailored slacks, cashmere scarf, sweater and hunting jacket. The farmers would undoubtedly have known of him – ‘a wealthy man, that one. Inherited his fortunes from his father’s business acumen, of course – ’. Such whispered comments might have passed between them elsewhere but here they both stared and nodded deferentially. In any case, Raymond was new to the world of the olive and simply repeated whatever information he had been fed by René. These recent triumphs lay in his farm’s phenomenal production and Raymond was basking in this new lease of life, of glory. I decided to keep any other opinions and travel experiences to myself. Instead, I raised my glass to wish them both, him and René, good health. ‘Santé! Here’s to a continually robust harvest.’

  Debating further was futile. Why spoil a decent friendship when I knew they were not to be swayed?

  Ironically, though, it was through René, by chance on that Saturday, that I learned of the existence of a certain vegetable farmer, a local resident and maverick who went by the name of Luke. He lived in the hills behind Nice and was ‘trying to change the world’.

  ‘Just like you, Carol,’ my silver-haired friend quipped. ‘More concerned with saving the planet than producing quality olive oil.’

  ‘In what way?’ I asked.

  ‘Thinks organic,’ pronounced René, spitting out the words as though they were a disgusting taste. ‘A couple of pals were talking about him, read about him in the farming gazette, some darned trick he’s got up his sleeve.’ Luke – René gave me his full name – intended to outsmart the chemical companies.

  By now it was late morning and a full crowd had encircled us, listening in, greedy to hoover up other folks’ business, for there is not a great deal to do while the paste churns, a process that takes a couple of hours, and is transformed into oil. They began chipping in, these twisted and ruddied faces of the earth with hands as rough as bears’ claws, haranguing me with their heated opinions, nosing into our conversation as was their norm. One farmer’s business down here was every other’s.

  ‘And why not, why shouldn’t he try to be organic?’ I protested.

  ‘Because he won’t succeed.’

  ‘You can’t,’ was another’s opinion.

  Bah and humbug was the prevailing attitude of those standing about me.

  ‘This woman here is under the impression that Spain will soon be transfigured into a desert.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake!’ cried some.

  ‘All the better!’ cried others.

  ‘You’ve got to kill those little blighters off good and proper, poison the creepy-crawlies or they multiply. This bloke – what’s his name? Luke? He’s not doing any of us any favours. The infestations spread and then we all cop it,’ berated another, spittle dribbling until trapped within the curvature of his upturned, stubbled chin.

  ‘There are no solutions that work, that are efficace, effective.’

  ‘Only pesticides do the trick.’

  Mmm. I sipped my delicious rosé, enjoying the illicit
experience of being one notch tipsy at ten in the morning, and kept all further opinions to myself. The subject was a minefield, but I had made a mental note of Luke’s name and how I might get hold of him.

  Tracking Luke on that first occasion was perfectly straightforward. His telephone number was displayed on the half-page of advertisements in our weekly agricultural paper. I rang it, left a message and he returned my call within a couple of days.

  Michel suggested we invite him to lunch and find out what his ‘maverick’ ideas were all about, which we did and he accepted.

  Luke became my hope, my beacon on a precarious landscape. He was a petit fermier, he had told me on the phone, predominantly a maraîcher, a cultivator of vegetables on a modest holding that also counted a few peach, apricot and almond trees. Olives were a small return for him, little more than a sideline. However, he had taken a step, which, when we first heard about it, I had judged to be bold, defiant and ahead of its time. He, like me, had grown tired of waiting for an alternative to pesticides to become available and had taken matters into his own hands. To defeat Bactrocera (Dacus) oleae, Luke had called in the help of a smart little foreigner.

  If this was to be believed, he had achieved the impossible. However, fly populations were greater in the hot, humid coastal regions such as ours so Luke would have had a slightly easier time of it at his place.

  Bactrocera (Dacus) oleae (nicknamed ‘Dacus’ on our farm because it was less of a mouthful) was a small fly about five millimetres in length. He hibernated in winter, buried within the soil in Mediterranean olive groves, and only surfaced for procreation purposes when the weather grew warm. Twenty-five degrees Celsius and upwards was his happy zone. Dacus’ female partner, when she was ready to give birth, infested the silvery foliage and inserted her ovipositor, her egg-laying organ, into budding olive fruits, piercing the skin’s green surface and leaving a small black circle; her mark of entry, her passport stamp. Within two to four days, her eggs had hatched into larvae, which began to feed off the inner flesh of the olive, gorging ravenously, sapping it of all nutrients.