♪♪ [Ciriaco Chavez] So, we're in the heart of Yolo County, uh, in the Sacramento Valley.

Beautiful area, one of the premier locations to plant olives.

We're actually in the Dunnigan Hills in Yolo County.

Um, so, it's characterized by these nice rolling hills.

Fantastic location for growing olives.

Olives are one of the oldest cultivated tree crops known to humankind.

Researchers believe the origins of these beautiful trees could date back as far as 8,000 years, beginning in the Eastern Mediterranean.

To this day, the olive branch is a symbol of peace.

This day is action packed with a high-tech harvest running 24 hours a day for two months.

[Rob Stewart] They're so lush and packed.

[Ciriaco] Yeah, they're beautiful.

Yeah, yeah, It's... it's... it's a really fantastic year so far... Ciriaco Chavez oversees the harvest and is the VP of Agriculture at Cobram Estate based in Woodland, California.

He says California olives rival the best in the world.

[Ciriaco] At Cobram Estate, we're pioneering in California, the high density planting system which is sort of the spacing that you see here.

Trees further spaced out.

It allows us to plant any variety we want to plant.

These varieties, Picual, Coratina, Mission olives, which is another unique variety, um, that's unique to California.

We're bringing it back to life really.

It's a variety that was originally planted in California hundreds of years ago, the mission variety, which is the only uniquely Californian variety.

We won the world's healthiest olive oil with Mission variety olives.

Cobram Estate has a quarter million trees on thousands of acres of land in the Sacramento Valley.

Every single olive tree will pass through the giant mouth of the Colossus XL, a million-dollar machine and the only one of its kind in North America.

The machine has 750 picking rods that rotate and spin, which causes the olives to fall on conveyors and into a harvest trailer.

The speed of each row is calculated based on the number of olives per tree, stripping the branches of more than 90% of the ripe green fruit.

After the field harvest, it's a race against the clock.

The dangers for extra virgin olive oil are time and heat.

The faster these olives are off to the processing plant and into the mill just minutes from the field, the higher the quality of extra virgin olive oil.

The transformation from fruit to oil must happen within four to six hours.

Leandro Rivetti is co-CEO and Chief Oil Maker.

[Leandro] The... the olives that are picked directly from the tree with our harvesters get delivered to this mill.

The fruit arrives.

We just remove the leaves.

We blow the leaves away, clean the fruit, and then the fruit is crushed and turned into tapenade, like an olive paste, within a stainless-steel hammer crusher.

That olive paste is then mixed very gently and slowly for about an hour.

And that process that we call the malaxation process, um, allows the little droplets of oil that were present in the flesh of a fruit to merge and to form a larger oil phase that then will make the separation through a centrifuge much, much easier.

So that's it.

You know, that's the entire process.

There's no chemicals, there's no heat that- nothing added to it.

The extra virgin olive oil is stored inside these stainless-steel temperature-controlled tanks, locking in the freshness and the flavor until it's bottled, shipped and sold.

Each of these tanks holds one million dollars' worth of extra virgin olive oil, among the healthiest cooking oils available.

[Leandro] Probably, when it comes down to the prevention and... and the- let's call it treatment or management of chronic disease like, um, diabetes or cardiovascular disease, or even cognitive disease like Alzheimer's, there's no other food that comes even close to extra virgin olive oil in terms of the amount of medical evidence to support its use and... and its relevance within the context of the Mediterranean diet.

Normally, a doctor will refer to olive oil from the health perspective, they are really talking about extra virgin olive oil.

And when chefs talk about the fantastic flavors of olive oil, they actually are really talking about extra virgin olive oil.

Just in time to tempt your taste buds, pizza is coming out of this wood fire oven.

The recipe calls for a heavy drizzle of fresh extra virgin olive oil.

It's a savory delight and another version of California gold.

[Ciriaco] It's an important industry to be a part of.

It's an important industry because it's feeding America.

I'm really proud to say that I am working in an area, in a farm, especially in California, where we produce such a breadth of crops, from nuts to melons, to artichokes to extra virgin olive oil.

We're producing these extremely high-quality products and feeding America.

♪♪ Let's give you some olive knowledge.

All olives start out green and then turn black or dark purple as they ripen.

And olive trees have long lives.

Olive trees have been known to live hundreds of years.

If you're thinking of making your own olive oil, you'll need to press around 11 pounds of olives to make just one quart of olive oil.