Two issues

The first of these was prompted by the piece in this morning's FT at reference 1 about troubles in the olive groves of Spain, the biggest producer in the world. It seems that these troubles are to do with it having been too hot in the summer. I thought I would take a look, leading me to references 2, 3 and 4. With reference 5 providing the rain graphic above. A few take-aways follow.

While the olive is important in some countries - with the big producers traditionally being the big consumers - it is not a staple in the way that wheat is. If the olive fails, one can always make do with rape seed oil or palm oil.

Trees can be badly damaged, if not killed, by cold.

Heat is good for oil production, but trees can be badly damaged, if not killed, by excessive heat.

Trees need a cold period to get flowering going. This seems to exclude the tropics.

Trees, very roughly speaking, need about 600mm of rain a year.

All of which notwithstanding, a tough and versatile plant, well suited to food production.

All this, and history, means that olive production is concentrated in the Mediterranean region. It does not get much further north or much further south. However, production is now pushing into the southern hemisphere, with a lot of activity in Argentina and Chile.

So it may be that Spain and Italy are in for a hard time in the olive department, but the rest of us will probably get by.

The second was an arty matter. Looking at some of Monica Poole's foxgloves this morning, I was reminded that to satisfy the tax man in the 1960's, the producer of wood blocks for sale was obliged to deface them after pulling some number of prints, possibly 25, if he or she wanted to avoid becoming liable for some additional tax. So this was what one did: one laboured for weeks over one's block, produced one's 25 prints - that is to say a limited edition of 25, marked serially by the artist, for example 17/25 - and then destroyed the block. Perhaps by scoring hard, right across the middle of it. Perhaps by planing down the cut surface so that it could be reused.

Speaking for myself, I find it quite hard to destroy my own creations, perhaps a piece of writing, perhaps a piece of carpentry or a chunk of concrete. At least as far as the finished article is concerned: I can be brutal with drafts and with failure. I can also destroy (or eat) plants that I have grown - which might also have consumed a good amount of care and attention.

A related issue is the difficulty some of us have with pruning our writings. Once the sentence or paragraph has emerged onto the screen or the page, we find it hard to cross it out. So we might find it helpful to have an editor to push us into doing the right thing.

So it all seems to vary a good deal, vary between people and vary with time and circumstance. But I still think I would find destroying a block difficult.

PS: the image above is not that in question, but it is very much the same sort of thing. And I am reminded how poorly woodcuts of this sort reproduce electronically, even with all today's pixels.

References

Reference 1: Soaring olive oil prices hurt sales of ‘liquid gold’ in Mediterranean heartland: Poor harvests hitting production have forced up the cost of key ingredient - Barney Jopson, Susannah Savage, Financial Times - 2024.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive.

Reference 3: Oleiculture in progress - E. Marone, P. Fiorino - 2012.

Reference 4: Olive Cultivation in the Southern Hemisphere: Flowering, Water Requirements and Oil Quality Responses to New Crop Environments - Mariela Torres, Pierluigi Pierantozzi, Peter Searles, M Cecilia Rousseaux, Georgina García-Inza, Andrea Miserere, Romina Bodoira, Cibeles Contreras, Damián Maestri - 2017.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_precipitation.