From backyard olives to community olive oil

Producing your own oil is a key step towards self-sufficiency. Olive oil has many health benefits and olive trees grow well in the Mount Alexander Shire and surrounds. They tolerate drought and frost and can produce an abundant crop of oil-rich olives.

But what do you do with the olives once you’ve harvested them? How do you extract the oil? This can be a real challenge for small olive producers. Setting up your own olive oil press is messy and expensive. You could try going to one of the commercial olive oil presses but they usually require at least 100 kg of olives. What should the backyard producer do with their small crop of olives?

MALETS has found a way to help – we do a communal olive oil processing every year. Members pick their own olives and we pool them all together to take to a small local olive oil press in Sedgwick. The resulting oil is distributed among the participants, in proportion to the weight of olives they contributed.

MALETS has been doing this since 2022. In 2025 we had more than 20 people picking olives at 15 different properties, ending up with a total of 693 kg of olives. The smallest contribution was 4 kg of olives from one tree – the biggest was 155 kg from about 20 trees. From the 693 kg of olives, we got 100 kg of delicious cold pressed olive oil.

Some people have lots of olive trees and need help with picking. Others are want olive oil but don’t have any olive trees. MALETS helps match growers with pickers. The usual arrangement is that the picker gets a 50% share of the olives they pick for someone else, so they end up with a share of the oil. The grower benefits by getting more of their olives picked and the picker benefits by getting a share of the oil.

Would you like to be part of the olive oil project in 2026? We welcome new olive producers and olive pickers, whether you’re an existing MALETS member or you’d like to join up.

Anne Perkins, MALETS member and one of the coordinators of the communal olive processing.