Adoption · Sumud · Re-terroiring
A tree is a slow instrument. It records drought, altitude, soil and neglect in the chemistry of its fruit, and it hands that record to whoever eats it. To adopt one is to enter that record — to know the soil your oil came from and the hands that pruned it.
It is also, in some places on this earth, an act of refusal. An olive tree is a claim on land. That is precisely why they are uprooted.
Tropicual is a small family holding in the Sierra de Cazorla, high in the mountains above Hinojares, run by Lucía and Albert. They publish their lab analysis before we ever ask for it. Their Adopt a Tree programme lets you take one tree in that grove as your own: you follow its year, and the oil it bears comes to you.
It is re-terroiring made literal. Not a subscription — a relationship with one tree, its soil, and the people who tend it. The harder that tree works to live in thin mountain ground, the more polyphenols its fruit carries, and the more the oil gives back to the body that receives it.
The record — Palestine
The olive is not decoration in Palestine. It is the material base of a rural economy, the marker of inherited land, the reason a family returns to a hillside every October. Roughly half of all cultivated Palestinian land is olive. Around a hundred thousand families live in part off the harvest.
Destroying those trees is not collateral. It is a technique. Uproot the grove and you remove the income, the legal claim of continuous cultivation, the reason to stay, and the memory held in wood that is older than the state doing the uprooting. Jurists call this ecocide; the International Court of Justice has been asked to consider the wider campaign as genocide. Farmers call it what it has always been: dispossession, carried out one root ball at a time.
We are an olive oil company. We would be cowards to sell the fruit of this tree and say nothing about where it is being torn out of the ground.
Palestinian olive trees uprooted, bulldozed or destroyed by the Israeli state and settlers since 1967 — the equivalent of razing all of Central Park roughly thirty-three times over.
Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem (ARIJ); Oxfam, 2012 onward
Average annual figure recorded by UN humanitarian monitoring in the occupied West Bank across recent years — burned, cut, poisoned, or crushed, overwhelmingly during the October–November harvest.
UN OCHA oPt, Protection of Civilians database
Satellite assessment of Gaza's orchards and olive groves following October 2023: the vast majority damaged or destroyed by bulldozing, bombardment and the deliberate levelling of agricultural land.
FAO / UNOSAT geospatial damage assessments, 2024–2025
Palestinian families whose income depends in whole or part on the olive harvest. Olives cover close to half of all cultivated land in the occupied territories.
UN OCHA; FAO Palestine
Many uprooted trees are Roumi — ancient, some Roman-era. They cannot be replanted, only mourned. A sapling takes seven to twelve years to bear a serious crop, and a lifetime to bear like its parent.
B'Tselem; Al-Haq field documentation
Figures are drawn from UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory reporting, FAO and UNOSAT satellite damage assessments, ARIJ, Oxfam, B'Tselem and Al-Haq. Where sources differ we give the conservative range. Verify them yourself — we would rather you did.
Sumud — steadfastness — is the Palestinian word for staying put. Not spectacle. The daily, unglamorous work of pruning, ploughing, and returning to a hillside that someone with a bulldozer would prefer you abandoned.
It is the same logic that runs through everything we make. A nervous system that has been made frantic is a nervous system that cannot tend anything slowly. Groves are lost that way; so are lives. Recovery is not an aesthetic. It is the capacity to keep returning to the same ground.
An adopted tree — in the Sierra de Cazorla or in the hills above Jenin — is a refusal of the disposable. You cannot optimise a tree. You can only stay with it, year after year, until it gives.
You are not a project to be perfected. You are a root system to be reconnected.
We take nothing from any of these. Go to them directly.
Sierra de Cazorla, Hinojares, Andalusia
Choose a tree in Lucía and Albert's grove. Follow its year — flowering, veraison, harvest, mill — and receive the oil that tree bears. Small family holding, published lab analysis, no intermediaries.
Tropicual →West Bank, Palestine (Joint Advocacy Initiative, YMCA/YWCA)
Sponsor an olive tree planted on land at risk of confiscation — land near the separation wall, settlements, and military zones. Planting is itself the legal and material claim: worked land is harder to declare 'state land'. Volunteers join the planting and harvest seasons.
JAI Palestine →Palestine (Zaytoun CIC, UK)
UK-based fair trade cooperative funding the planting of olive saplings with Palestinian farming families, alongside the import of Palestinian Nabali and Rumi oil. Trees are planted where groves have been uprooted or burned.
Zaytoun →Jenin, Palestine
The Palestine Fair Trade Association organises roughly two thousand smallholder families around organic, fair trade olive oil. Buying the oil is the adoption: it keeps the grove economically viable, which is what keeps it standing.
Canaan →If you can only do one thing: buy Palestinian olive oil, every year, from a cooperative that names its farmers. An economically viable grove is a grove that gets replanted.
Plant something that will outlive the thing trying to remove it.
Para la gente.