Planting seeds, growing olives
A former Walt Disney World chef buys Lake County’s Hunt Island.
GROVELAND — Keith Keogh envisions rows of olive trees dotting his 35-acre island in Groveland, but first he has an abandoned citrus grove to rip up.
Keogh, a 66-year-old former chef for Disney World and Red Lobster among others, spent $750,000 last year to buy Hunt Island in Lake County. It’s been abandoned since the 1970s when a series of freezes prompted many growers in Lake County to give up on citrus. The trees are now victim to citrus greening, which has turned lush, sweet oranges into something bitter, green and misshapen.
But Keogh sees an agricultural future in olives on the island in Cherry Lake, part of the Clermont Chain of Lakes.
“Not for olive oil, that takes too many olives,” Keogh said. “Eating olives like in a muffuletta or making it into a brine.’’
After the land is cleared and the olive crop is flourishing, Keogh plans to supply friends and fellow chefs with his olives — and even open a restaurant nearby using olives, vegetables and animals raised on the island. But the centerpiece of the Hunt Island experiment is olives, a crop some have suggested as an alternative to replace Florida’s ravaged citrus industry. Citrus production last year in Florida was less than a quarter what it was in the peak of 1998, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Citrus greening, a plant disease spread by tiny insects, has been mostly to blame since the mid-2000s, and many groves in Central Florida have been plowed under to make way for other uses of land.
A handful of ambitious agriculturists have proposed planting olive groves as the solution since the tree fruit also thrives in sandy soil with good drainage.
American olive farmers have significantly increased their production in the past decade, but the U.S. still imports about 95 percent of the olive oil it consumes.
“Right now we are still in the research stage in Florida,” said Michael Garcia, president of the Florida Olive Council. “We need to do the research to figure out what can grow here. It takes years to develop a tree crop like olives in a new area.”
California and Texas are the most conducive regions of the United States for olives. Most trees need 200 to 400 “chill hours” between 32 and 45 degrees to produce the best fruit.
Garcia said it doesn’t stay cold long enough during Central Florida’s winteriest weeks for those varieties, but there is promising research being done at the University of Florida on African olives or by crossbreeding to make a new type.
“You can grow olives here, just not enough yet to be a big industry,” Garcia said.
While olives haven’t been proven to be a viable crop for major agricultural production, there are a handful of growers in the Orlando area growing varieties such as arbequina, arbosana and koroneiki.
Keogh’s property has diseased orange trees growing 40 feet high from a lack of attention. By midOctober, after which he hopes to have state approval, he said he plans to put in his first 250 olive trees. It will take three to five years for the trees to bear fruit.
He said he’s financing the project himself, buying tractors and hiring workers. In addition to working in Orlando, he’s been a corporate chef in New Orleans, Las Vegas and St. Louis for casinos and chains such as Levy Restaurants.
“I worked all those corporate jobs, so that one day I would have the money to do this,” he said. “We purchased this island to have a place we can make a little bit of food — good clean food.”
He spent the last year on the property, pulling stumps and clearing a few acres for his first section of trees.
Keogh wants to build a functioning farm to feed to locally produced food movement and sees olives as the centerpiece. There will also be chickens, Aberdeen cattle and a New Zealand breed of pig called Kunekune.
“We’ve got to figure something out; greening has taken the citrus away from Florida,” Keogh said. “And what’s going to take its place? Hopefully not apartments.”