This past Wednesday was our first olive harvest of the year. And what a day! The team of twelve harvesters got about 11.5 tons (23,000 pounds) of olives to press into olive oil.
How do we know when it’s time to harvest olives? We’re balancing flavor and yield to get a flavorful oil with a decent amount of oil per ton of olives harvested. Green, less ripe olives yield less oil but have a stronger flavor (more polyphenols). Mature, dark olives yield more oil but have a milder taste. On Wednesday, we picked Leccino olives and Picual. The Leccino were more ripe, the Picual were more green. Oil yield varies significantly between varieties, and is also influenced by ripeness, moisture, and extraction processed. We generally expect around 30 gallons of oil per ton.
We normally harvest olives by hand, using little rakes to comb the fruit off the trees. It’s an all hands on deck effort. You can see a video of it here. Last week, we did a modified machine harvest, which we trialed last year and found that it worked relatively well. We used the shaker that we use for almond and walnut harvesting to shake the trees, while a few folks whacked the trees with poles (another common olive harvest method). Fortunately, Andrew captured a video of the process!
