Oil entrepreneurs Ricky Jones ’08 (left) and Dvin Adalian ’09 hang out under an olive tree along Caltech’s Olive Walk. Their impromptu foray into olive oil production this past winter has launched a new cultivation initiative on campus.

Black Gold, Techer Tea

By Mike Rogers

We may live in an era of diminishing petroleum resources, but two enterprising Caltech students recently alerted the Institute to the fact that it is sitting on valuable oil reserves. Not Brent Sweet Light black crude, alas, but Pasadena virgin light green—of the olive persuasion.

The Caltech campus has been home to dozens of Mission olive trees for approximately 80 years, but they’ve rarely been picked. While they’ve been admired for the shade they provide, they’ve also been blasted for the squishy, inky slime that they deposit on sidewalks when their overripe fruit drops to the ground. But the tradition of not-so-benign neglect is changing, thanks to sophomore Dvin Adalian and junior Ricky Jones.

The two students—both members of Ruddock House, where Ricky is president—were seeking relief from typical first-term stress last October, when they stepped outside for a study break, surveyed the parallel lines of trees along the eponymously named Olive Walk, and agreed that it would be an admirable diversion to concoct a batch of olive oil. Several hours later, exhausted from beating most of the olives off one tree with a large stick and then washing them, Adalian and Jones had dumped their impromptu crop into an ice chest and were preparing to leave it outside, when Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau and his wife, Carol Carmichael, out on a weekend stroll, stopped to chat. A longtime proponent of environmental sustainability, Chameau made the two students an offer they seemingly couldn’t refuse: if Adalian and Jones could actually distill a respectable amount of olive oil, he and Carmichael would cook dinner for them.

Inspired by the prospect of a home-cooked meal, Dvin and Ricky scoured the Internet for olive oil production methods, then returned to the task a few days later. They put the cleaned and pitted olives in blenders and created a mush, which they then cooked in pots for a couple of hours in three kitchens in Ruddock. “It made a pungent odor that many didn’t appreciate,” admitted Jones. “It looked like excrement.” But the noxious side effects of food processing weren’t enough to stop Kraft from churning up Cheez Whiz or Hormel from spinning out Spam, and they weren’t about to deter Adalian and Jones either.

To extract the oil, they first tried using a cinder block to press the resulting sludge through a plastic bag with tiny holes. When that didn’t work, they borrowed some window screens and pressed the mixture through them, squeezing out 40 liters of liquid—mostly water—into a garbage can. They skimmed the oil off the top, yielding half a liter of oil. “As it looked more and more like olive oil, we were getting more and more excited,” Jones said.

But the final product didn’t exactly look pristine—there was still some solid material floating around—so they consulted Bruce Hay, associate professor of biology. He put their mixture in one of his centrifuges, allowing the students to further refine the liquid and extract pure olive oil. They gave out samples to friends and family, and, at 10 p.m. one evening, they dropped by the president’s house and presented a vial of oil to Chameau and Carmichael. And two weeks later, just after Thanksgiving, the promised dinner took place, complete with a tasting of the Caltech olive oil and some store-bought competitors.

“It had a different flavor from commercial brands, but I think it was on a par with them,” Jones said. Added Adalian, “I thought it was good.” Independent consumers were even more enthusiastic. “It was delicious,” said Carmichael.

As word spread throughout campus about the students’ epicurean feat, interest in expanding the olive oil enterprise started to grow. Dean Currie, vice president for business and finance, asked Delmy Emerson, director of buildings and grounds, to look into the potential for olive oil production on campus. Until two years ago, Emerson’s staff had been spraying the trees to suppress their olive production. Now she’d have to learn how to set them free.

In late November, she embarked on her own olive oil experiment. “We collected 250 pounds of olives from Caltech trees and produced three gallons of oil” with the help of a nonprofit olive oil producer in Ojai, she said. Buildings and grounds designed its own labels—calling the oil Caltech’s First—featuring a photo of the Olive Walk. In December, samples of the oil were presented to members of the Caltech Board of Trustees and the administration, who agreed that a full-scale harvest in 2007 should proceed.

“Doing a full harvest was something we thought was possible,” said Carmichael, who directed Georgia Tech’s Institute for Sustainable Technology and Development and now holds the title of senior counselor for external relations and faculty associate in engineering and applied science at Caltech. “But I don’t think we’d have the confidence to go forward without Delmy doing the research.”

The plan is to have student, staff, and faculty volunteers participate in a one-day harvest in the fall, when the majority of olives will be ripe for plucking. Buildings and grounds staff will do the picking, while students, staff, and faculty will load olives into crates.

Caltech’s buildings and grounds crew learned about the ins and outs of olive cultivation from expert Craig Makela, of the Santa Barbara Olive Company, in a talk on campus this spring.

In March, Emerson brought to campus Craig Makela, the president of the Santa Barbara Olive Company, to survey the state of Caltech’s olive trees and give her grounds crew a few tips on pruning, watering, soil preparation, and pest control. He observed that Caltech’s olive trees had been allowed to grow about 30 feet higher than the ideal harvesting height of 20 feet, which meant that the grounds crew would have to climb ladders or work out of cherry pickers. He also said that the trees were overwatered and would need to be adorned with fly traps and sprayed with an organic insecticide known as Spinosad to protect them from destructive olive fruit flies.

While the trees seemed to fall a bit short of Makela’s agricultural ideal, the ebullient olive meister quickly predicted that the harvest would be successful—as long as the olives were picked by hand. Beating them off with a stick, he warned, would cause bruising. “We will pick about 60 to 70 trees, and I will return to you several hundred gallons of extra virgin, cold-pressed, hand-picked, organic olive oil,” he told an audience that included Emerson, her building and grounds team, interested students, and other administrators, including Carmichael. “You should have the oil by the end of this year or the beginning of next year.”

Based on Makela’s projections, Emerson thinks that there should be enough olive oil to sell in the campus bookstore and maybe online to alumni. Carmichael noted that the olive oil could also be served with meals in the Athenaeum. “It’s a process, but it’ll be fun,” Emerson said. “We know we can make money,” which, she said, will benefit students and staff through scholarships or other programs. “We think it’s doable. If we put our efforts together, we can do it at cost and create revenue.”

We’ll find out this fall whether the ancient art of olive cultivation, which dates back some 7,000 years, has a future on Caltech’s high-tech campus. Carmichael, for one, thinks that an olive harvest will yield benefits beyond the bottled product. She points out that picking the olives means that they will no longer litter the Caltech walkways, and that the opportunity to gather a campus crop offers a “community-building benefit. The idea is to have an activity that brings people out and makes them more aware of the physical environment. So many of us have our minds so much on work that we don’t realize how beautiful the campus is and how productive it can be.”