While we are busy on the farm fertilising the orchards and getting ready for the next growing season, we thought we would invite you behind the scenes to show you one of the many battles organic farmers fight to bring truly chemical-free food to your table.

Every spring, usually around April or May, an uninvited guest shows up in our olive orchards. A tiny creature but with abig appetite, at first just a few, but a few months later they have multiplied into full-blown massive armies. Meet the olive fruit fly (Bactrocera Oleae)

The olive fly lands on a young olive, takes a quick sip of moisture and, while it is at it, lays a single egg. That egg soon turns into a larva which burrows inside the olive, happily eating it from the inside out until the olive shrivels up and drops from the tree. Not exactly the ending we (and the olive) are hoping for…….

Back in 2013 and 2014, armed with the kind of naïve optimism only beginners possess, we decided to let nature do its thing. How much damage could a few tiny flies really cause ….. ??. We found out and lost our entire harvest. Two years in a row. A painful, but very effective lesson.

Once we swallowed our pride and dusted ourselves off, we spoke to other organic farmers. The advice was clear: the standard organic defence is an insecticide called Spinosad, derived from naturally occurring soil bacteria and approved for organic farming.

A closer look revealed a problem. While Spinosad is generally allowed in organic agriculture, it isn’t actually authorised for olives, even though many if not all olive farmers still use it. (Organic certifying bodies know this, but unfortunately do not act.) And while it is considered low-toxicity for humans and mammals, it is highly toxic to bees and some aquatic life. We have a large thriving bee population on our farm and sacrificing the bees to save the olives felt like winning the battle but losing our souls. So we decided to look for alternatives. After some further digging we discovered a rather clever alternative: kaolin. 

Kaolin is a natural white clay mineral, when mixed with water and sprayed onto the olive trees, it forms a fine white film over the leaves and fruit. It doesn’t kill anything, it simply confuses the fruit flies as their sensors can no longer recognise olives as olives. When applied correctly, kaolin can reduce fruit fly damage by 80 to 90%, without harming bees, birds, or any other beneficial life on the farm.

As we are one of the very few farners to use Koalin (it is much more labour intensive than spraying Spinosad), we had to develop the spraying technique ourselves. It took us three years of experimenting to get it right but now our trees proudly wear their seasonal white summer coats, the fruit flies remain largely confused, and the bees are still here happily pollinating the huge variety of flowering plants and producing superb organic honey.

We might have mentioned in earlier newsletters that much of what we do on Querubi are driven by the insights of the Japanese farmer philospher Masanobu Fukuoka. One of his great one’s was that :

"Nature is unforgiving, if we neglect her she will return 
wielding a pitchfork in vengeance."
 
The bees at Querubi probably agree, and we hope so do you ……
 
With gratitude, The Querubi Team