San Martin, California

About Frantoio Grove

A family farm, olive mill, and small food business.

Most mornings at Frantoio Grove start with fog. It comes in from the coast and slides over the low hills between us and Watsonville, even in the summer. You pull in past the Quonset hut, get greeted by a rooster named Chef, and look out at thirty acres of olive trees and a field that is never quite as tidy as a brochure would like it to be.

There are rabbits in the rows, birds in the trees, and once the day warms up all manner of buzzing insects floating in and out of the trees. The ground is covered in a wild mix of cover crop, volunteer plants, and a deep layer of mulch.

This is Frantoio Grove: a family farm, olive mill, and small food business in San Martin, California. We grow olives, make cold-pressed olive oil, work with producers we respect, and try to make things that earn a place in your kitchen.

ON THIS PAGE

THE FARM

Thirty acres that were supposed to be something else.

The orchard was planted in 2005, on what was originally part of a rural housing plan.

The property is about ninety seven acres. Under the old zoning, it could have become nineteen five acre home sites. There are a lot of properties like that around here: a house, several acres of dirt, and a scale that is too large to landscape in any meaningful way but too small to support a real farm.

97

ACRES

30

ACRE ORCHARD

2005

PLANTED

2015

MILL BUILT

Olive orchard and surrounding hills in San Martin

The original idea was to cluster the homes and keep part of the land permanently open. Then the housing market crashed, the plan stopped, and the olives kept growing.

Years later, when development again became possible, we had a clearer picture of what the property could be. Rather than build houses around the orchard, we put the entire property into permanent agricultural open space through the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority. There are a few places for necessary buildings, but the land itself will remain open.

That matters to us. San Martin is changing quickly, and working land does not come back once it is paved over.

The orchard is planted to Frantoio, a cultivar with a long Italian history and a reputation for making serious oil. It was never the obvious choice if the goal was volume. There are varieties that yield more heavily and fit the economics of large scale, high density California production better.

We were never going to compete on price with the large producers.

We wanted our Frantoio extra virgin olive oil to have a real point of view: one cultivar, grown here, milled here, expressive enough to stand on its own at the table. Frantoio gave us a place to start.

FAMILY + FARMING

A family story, but not a straight line

Agriculture has been part of our family story for a long time, though not in a neat line from one olive orchard to the next.

My ancestor Hugh McElroy LaRue farmed in Yolo County in the nineteenth century. His Arlington Farm grew a broad mix of crops, including olives. He was also involved in the early push for agricultural research in California, and his son Jacob was part of the effort to bring the University Farm to Davis. That school eventually became UC Davis.

We knew the LaRue name was tied to farming in California. We did not grow up with a romantic family farming script or a handoff waiting for us. We found our own way back to it.

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1800s

Hugh LaRue farms in Yolo County

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1980s

Willi plants her vineyard in Healdsburg

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2005

Orchard planted

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2008

First harvest

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2015

Dedicated mill building

Willi’s way back to the land

My grandmother, Jean Marie Willi, who went by Willi Martin and later Willi Hilliard, grew up in town but spent time visiting family on the vineyard. She hoped she might one day take it over. The vineyard was sold before that could happen, but she and her husband Toby moved to Sonoma County in the 1980s and planted a vineyard of their own.

Willi was proud of our oil. She kept a bottle around for salads. But she was also a genuinely great cook, with a worn copy of Julia Child permanently on the counter, and she was firmly on team butter. (Frankly, so am I, you don’t have to choose.)

Agriculture runs in the family.

(Apparently nobody thought to warn us.)

Learning the orchard

My dad, Jeff, came to the orchard with a background in landscape architecture, real estate, and construction. He understood plants and land well, but had not grown olives before. He started going to classes, seminars, and industry meetings as California olive oil production was beginning to take off. I went along sometimes.

When we planted, I helped mark pollinator rows, drove a box truck while trees were unloaded, and did wiring for irrigation. The summer after high school, a friend and I spent the mornings pruning trees and the afternoons watching the World Cup when it got too hot to keep going.

From flashlights to a mill

Our first bottling setup was equally improvised. Four of us worked one bottle at a time. One person operated a homebrew racking cane that was meant to start a siphon, not really act as a pump. One held the bottle up to a flashlight and called out when the oil reached the right level. One capped and shrink wrapped. One applied labels by hand.

It was slow. It was ridiculous. It got the oil into bottles.

A few years later we had a proper mill and, by 2015, a dedicated mill building. We are still a hands on operation, but thankfully nobody is filling bottles by flashlight anymore.

What changed

The work got more interesting.

I came back to the farm full time in 2020 after working in coffee. At first, it was supposed to be a place to land for a while. The pandemic had changed my plans, and the farm was familiar.

Then a string of hard years made it impossible to keep treating it as temporary.

A sheep among tall green plants and yellow flowers.

Reassessing the orchard

Poor harvests in 2020 and 2022 forced a bigger conversation about how we were managing the orchard. We had to ask what was actually working, what we were doing out of habit, and what we had not bothered to measure closely enough.

Observe. Measure. Adjust.

My dad learned farming through observation, conversation, and the accumulated knowledge of people who had been doing it for a long time. That is real knowledge. It takes work and attention to know a field well enough to notice when something has changed.

I came back with spreadsheets, weather data, and the possibly annoying urge to measure everything twice.

Now we use local weather station data to estimate how much water the orchard is using, and we revisit irrigation decisions several times a week during the dry season. We track the crop, the oil, our tasting notes, the weather, and what changes from year to year.

We also started changing

what the orchard looks like.

The ground is not bare anymore. For us, regenerative farming means growing cover crops, spreading compost made from local horse manure and olive pomace, grazing sheep, and leaving room for plants that a conventional farm might call weeds. Oats, rye, peas, fenugreek, chard, and volunteer plants all have a job to do. Their roots hold soil in place, open up compacted ground, feed soil life, and keep the orchard from becoming a hot, exposed field of dust.

Green ground cover growing between olive trees at Frantoio Grove.

Some years the chard gets enormous. It stands out above everything else with leaves that look far too big for a cover crop. I love it.

The long view

We farm organically and are Regenerative Organic Certified®. That is not a finish line or a claim that we have everything figured out. It is a framework for doing the work more carefully and taking the long view.

The part that keeps us interested is what those changes might make possible in the oil.

Oil for food

We are
making oil
for food.

Olive oil has a habit of being discussed like a contest. The highest number wins. The most bitterness wins. The oil that hits you hardest in the throat wins.

Those things can be part of an oil, and they can be useful signals. They are not the whole story.

Frantoio Grove olive oil being poured beside bread, hummus, and linen.

There are oils that are impressive in a tasting room but difficult to cook with.

They can feel like a knuckle sandwich: memorable, but foreceful and not especially interested in the rest of your dinner.

That is not what we are after.

We care about oils that are aromatic, layered, balanced, and alive on food. We want an oil that has presence without flattening everything else on the plate. We want green fruit, herbs, pepper, ripe notes when they belong there, bitterness when it has a purpose, and enough complexity that you keep coming back to the bottle.

As the orchard has changed, we have started seeing oils with more aroma, less blunt bitterness, and a better sense of balance. We still debate the details. We still have years that humble us. Farming will do that.

But the work feels worthwhile when an oil is good enough to make you pause over a piece of bread, then good enough to disappear into a dish and make the whole thing taste more like itself.

How our oil is made →

Explore our olive oils →

The grove
now

Today, Frantoio Grove is run by a small team.

Three members of the Frantoio Grove team with products in the olive orchard.

My wife Claire came in to help during the holidays with experience from managing coffee operations. She knew how to process orders, answer customer questions, deal with lost packages, keep an online store moving, and generally handle the hundred unglamorous things that make a small business work. She returned the next holiday season and stayed.

My dad is still part of the farm. We still have spirited conversations about irrigation, weeds, cover crops, harvest timing, and oil. That is part of the deal.

There is always work waiting: more trees to plant, better space to mill and store oil, repairs to make, orders to pack, and a chicken to get out of the barn before he decides the pallet of bottles is his new home.

Looking ahead

We are building toward a version of Frantoio Grove that is more useful to the people around us. More room to grow. Better infrastructure for the harvest. More chances to bring people out to the farm, walk a row, taste freshly milled olio nuovo, and see what goes into it.

For now, we are here in San Martin, taking care of the trees and making the best oil we know how to make.