About Harvesting Olives

We have been pretty enthralled so far by the process of harvesting olives for olive oil. For those of you interested in how olive oil gets from the tree to your table, it goes something like this:

1. Large nets are spread out below the olive tree

2. With long (and surprisingly durable) forks, we mercilessly whack the trees to get the olives to fall off. The tree gets its revenge by flinging a few olives straight into our eye, and taunts us by dropping most of its olives, but leaving a few hanging here and there which we pick off by hand.

3. Periodically the olives are gathered up, the large sticks are picked out, and they are put into huge burlap sacks. In our case it took six or seven trees worth of olives to fill up a sack.

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(You may notice that there are green, red and black olives here. Apparently there are different schools of thought about which makes the best oil. But all the trees had olives of various sizes and various stages of ripeness, so inevitably it was a mixture that went into our bags.)

4. The 30-kilo sacks are taken down to the nearest processing plant...

...loaded onto pallets, and given a place in line with all of the other harvesters' hauls.

5. The olives are crushed up into bits! Mwuah ha ha! Pictured above is an olive crusher that was used right up until the 80s. Cool! The machinery is a bit fancier now:

The olives are separated from the leaves and an Archimedes' screw pulls them up the chute

olives travel down the ramp

into the Masticator

And spun in a centrifuge to separate oil from water

Voila! The filtered oil is ready to go

either in 50 liter barrels

or into 5 or 10 liter tins

which are conveniently for sale at the factory.

Interestingly, the Greek government sets the per kilogram price paid for olive oil. There is some subsidization going on, but like all agriculture, it seems that the growers are hardly able to break even. Processing plants across the country pay 2.20 euros for 1 kilo of oil (approximately 1.2 liters).  At Villa Kitrini we harvested 140 trees for 600 kilos of olives and ended up with 210 liters of oil minus the processing plant's 10% off the top (all numbers are approximate).  This oil weighs 175 kilos and would fetch a price of 385 euros.  Not exactly getting rich.  A local taverna owner told us that if he hires workers to harvest his trees and pays the mandated wage of 30 euros per day he needs them to pick about 240 kilos each, per day, to break even.  Crazy.  He'd need to provide them with a branch stripping machine and a mechanical branch beater, both powered by a noisy generator, which altogether run about 1,300 euros.  There are very few olive farmers.  Most people do other jobs and have an orchard or two that they attend to part time.  Some have even said they wont bother with the harvest next year if the government set price is reduced as rumored.

A bit of beauty after after the ranting.