We had an experience with a member of the church (a professional agronomist) in Aix-en Province in Southern France. We talked to him for a while about the Allegory of the Olive Tree, and he said, "Yes, that is exactly what we do. You could use that chapter as a handbook and go out and just do what it says and you would raise good olives." And I remember Hugh Nibley saying years ago, "Whoever wrote Jacob 5 knew everything you need to know to cultivate olives." It is pretty amazing.
If you do not prune olive trees, they go wild; they revert back to being worthless, and you have to burn them. If you do not burn the prunings, you will get infestations and bugs and problems that will destroy the fruit and sometimes kill the trees. By clearing and dunging and doing all of those things, Zenos and Jacob were warning their people (and us) that if they did not allow themselves to be cultivated by the master and servant of the vinyard, they would not succeed.
William H. Krueger, Zachary Heath, and Dominic Deleonardis, "Patch Budding: A Convenient Method for Top-Working Olives," University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Publication 8115 (2004): 1–6. Olive culture in California follows exactly the same procedures as described.