Brian Chatterton

Brian Chatterton, author of "Growing olives for quality oil," became an olive grower by accident when he moved with his wife Lynne to Italy from Australia in 1990. In Australia, Brian had been a cereal and sheep farmer, grapegrower, winemaker and Minister of Agriculture in the South Australian government. Brian and Lynne bought a small farm with an olive grove with about 100 trees that had been abandoned for a decade or so. They could not let them go to ruin and started on the road to recuperating the trees, learning more about olive growing and planting more. They were fortunate to have a farming background to get them started. The neighbours provided practical advice and the local council ran courses for local olive growers. In the 1990's there were very few books available in English on olive growing but there were many good books and research papers written in Italian which helped Brian expand his knowledge of olive growing.

Brian and Lynne wrote their first book on olives in 1996 called "Discovering oil - Tales from an olive grove in Umbria." It was in response to a journey back to Australia where they saw Australian growers trying to come to grips with olive cultivation and oil production with little input from the major olive oil producing countries of Italy and Spain. Because of the language barrier they were limited to publications from California and Israel. The book was published by Pulcini Press and has sold nearly 2000 copies throughout the world.

The difficulty with a conventional book is that photographs are expensive so Brian decided to publish a greatly extended book for olive growers with dozens of photos, diagrams and charts to support the text as an ebook. This was published in 2005 on a CD at a time when most people were struggling to understand the ebook concept. The ebook was called "Growing olives and producing oil." It was well reviewed in the Australian Olivegrower and the Mediterranean Garden. The reviews are available in full on their web site www.cottage-umbria.com/books.html The Amazon Kindle version has been condensed to make it more user friendly on the Kindle format.

While Brian and Lynne came to olive growing by accident they were professional farmers in Australia and consultants to international institutions and national governments on farming matters in North Africa and West Asia. Countries in these regions have a Mediterranean climate similar to South Australia and their experience in developing sustainable farming systems is relevant to development needs of countries in the region.

Lynne and Brian wrote "Sustainable dryland farming," published by Cambridge University Press in 1996 and "Fodders for the Near East: annual medic pastures," for the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United nations. They also produced a series of farmer training kits on medic pastures and cereal rotations for FAO.

In 2003 Brian published an ironical account of his life in politics under the title "Roosters and featherdusters."

As well as these books Brian has written many articles on olives for Australian and New Zealand grower magazines, on farming for many international academic journals and more recently on water policy in Australia and North Africa.