Olive harvest

I got to help Gerrit and Wil with the remaining olive harvest for the season. For a city guy like me, it's interesting to see and experience it first hand.

Several large nets are spread out under the olive tree. Then, the olive branches are shaken by a shaking machine. This causes the olives to fall out of the tree, to be collected by the nets below.

Gerrit shaking a tree with a machine

Even after shaking, there are still some olives left on the trees. So, we WWOOFers pick the remaining olives by hand. I'm not sure if this is done on large commercial farms, because it's very labour intensive. But on small farms, we do all we can to increase the yield of the harvest.

Did you know that olives have been harvested for thousands of years? It's so old, it's even mentioned in the Bible: "When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow." (Deuteronomy 24:20) Translation: "When you shake the olive tree, don't pick the branches again. Leave some olives for the poor and less fortunate people." We certainly didn't listen to that!

Me picking olives by hand

Harvesting olive is hard work. We have to work all day from 8am to 5pm, instead of the standard 4-hour WWOOF work day. This is because the work is urgent. If the olives are not harvested quickly, they will rot and the oil produced from them will be bad. We are compensated by extra days off after the harvest, however, so it is all good.

After 2 days of hard work, we harvested about 2000kg of olives. That sounds like a lot, but I learned that it takes approximately 10kg of olives to produce 1 liter of oil. Put another way, the 2 tons of olives that we have will only produce 200 liters of oil. No wonder olive oil is so expensive.

Before harvest

After harvest