Comment by srj
7 days ago
>> There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
I'm not sure this is true. I buy olive oil specifically from California. It's niche but could be larger if they weren't competing with lower overseas labor costs.
7 days ago
>> There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
I'm not sure this is true. I buy olive oil specifically from California. It's niche but could be larger if they weren't competing with lower overseas labor costs.
Not 50 times larger which is what it would need to be to supply the current domestic consumption. California only produced 1.94 million gallons of olive oil in 2023, that same year the US used ~98.5 million gallons of olive oil.
Even if we could snap our fingers and create the orchards out of thin air there's not enough land and water to grow 50x our current production. Then where's the worker population coming from? They're also trying to drive overall immigration to essentially zero.
Don't olive trees take decades to reach maturity?
It takes time to ramp up olive oil production, so it’s way more cost effective to just import olive oil from countries with established crop.
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