The Casa Julia philosophy that we try to carry out is not focused on productivity, on the liters of oil to take home every year but on its quality, to be obtained only thanks to healthy and luxuriant plants because they are inserted in a fertile and rich in biodiversity soil. This is a path that will take years to come with slow improvements to the entire “olive grove ecosystem”.

Instead of intervening on each individual disease, we prefer to use products that support the individual plant to help it manage attacks from bacteria, fungi and various parasites.
The main, and almost only, product that we use is Wood Distillate which is administered through periodic foliar treatments.
Wood Distillate improves the resistance of plants to biotic stress (induced by another living organism) and abiotic stress (induced by a deficiency or excess of an environmental factor).

In the summer months when the attack of the olive fly is strongest, we used Kaolin, a product of mineral origin that, by covering the entire foliage and in particular the olives, disorients the fly which is no longer able to identify its target. Another important effect of Kaolin is protection from the sun's rays and heat.
This has allowed the olive trees to suffer less from the drought of this summer and to limit the loss of fruit already jeopardized by the spring weather.
Another choice that was made is to keep the entire olive grove grassy. No tillage of the soil but only the cutting of spontaneous herbs in late spring.
Herbs that were left on the ground together with the remains of the pruning to reduce the evaporation of the water as much as possible, lower its temperature and reduce erosion in case of rain (Casa Julia is located on a hill and its land is steep in places).

We will persist with these actions with the aim of returning a better micro-ecosystem than the one we found, thus demonstrating our respect for the territory that hosts us.