Georgia is set to open its first nursery that propagates olives through cuttings and grafting. I can already confidently tell you that we produce half a million seedlings every year, and within the next two years — one million. We will no longer need to import seedlings from abroad. What's more, these seedlings, grown in Georgia, are far stronger and accustomed to this climate. Beyond that, we stress some of the seedlings from the very beginning so that they grow stronger and require less watering. If, over the next five years, we can produce somewhere around 3–4 million seedlings, and 7–8 million over the following ten years, we will essentially transform the Dedoplistsqaro and Sighnaghi districts — Kakheti as a whole, primarily — into a little Andalusia, where much of the land today lies bare. The seedling we are working on today will give us the ability to produce the highest-quality olives in Georgia. Then, over the next five years, this production will allow us to replace, with natural, high-quality Georgian olive oil, the imported oil that today we honestly don't even know which country it comes from or what quality it is," Giorgi Svanidze stated.
