While at the grocery store yesterday I noticed that the store had a few shelves of cutting boards and bowls made of olive wood. They're made from non-producing olive trees in Tunisia. The little blurb on the cutting board suggested that the Tunisians cut down the trees once they stop producing.
I wonder if there's enough of a market that producing wood would incentivize cutting down infected trees. The grain is visually very distinctive and appealing and the items themselves weren't particularly cheap.
No, because the infected trees wood is crap and falls apart, it can't be used to make wood items or wooden stuff sadly :(
And yes, the tree wood of healthy plants is amazing.
Oh that's a shame. On the other hand it's likely that olive growers can adapt (although this means that traditions will change). We've done it with bananas, and, to some extent, citrus.
When I was staying in southern Spain in February, the home had a fireplace. The local gas station sold olive tree firewood.
This points to the conclusion that some pruning of olive trees is going on on a regular basis. At the same time we saw plenty of gnarly old trees and wondered what the different philosophies of olive tree pruning/cycling are.
I wonder if there's enough of a market that producing wood would incentivize cutting down infected trees. The grain is visually very distinctive and appealing and the items themselves weren't particularly cheap.