Harvesting olives

After reading the book Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller, I became fascinated by the production of olive oil.

I met Paul Piccirillo (from Athena’s gift) who is an olive grower in Gustine, CA. Each year, he organizes the “first day of harvest” where friends come and help him to start the harvest of his trees. After a quick training, we went to the grove to pick olives. I stopped for a couple of minutes to capture the process.

Olives are ripe

Olive trees seem to mature at very different times. In some trees the olives are mostly black (or ripe), in some other trees, the olives are mostly green (or not ripe yet). But interestingly enough, to make good olive oil, you need both, so it does not matter that you pick all the olives on the tree whether they are ripe or not.

Olives for olive oil can be black or green

In Paul’s grove, the bulk of the harvest is done by hand, one olive tree at a time. You would hold a bucket with a harness going over your shoulders, grab a branch as high as you can (the use of a ladder is definitely a must) and use your fingers as a comb on the branch to get the olives to fall in your bucket. Once the bucket is full, or you need a break, whichever comes first, you empty your bucket into a large bin and you go back to your tree.

Harvesting olives is time-consuming, hard work and slow. That’s why good olive oil is expensive to produce in California.

Harvesting olives by hand

Harvesting olives is time-consuming, hard work and slow. That’s why good olive oil is expensive to produce in California.

It took almost 2 hours for 5 people to harvest an entire tree and Paul’s grove has 400+ trees. Well, we were amateurs, Paul goes a lot faster than us. Paul also has a couple of mechanical arms. The arm can be handhold by just one person. The tip has a sort of rotating comb that shakes the branch and makes the olives fall onto a huge tarp spread at the bottom of the tree.

Harvesting olives using mechanical tools

Whether harvested by hand or with the help of the mechanical arm, the olives end up in large bins that are sent to the mill at the end of each day to be pressed into olive oil.

Harvesting olives by hand

Once full, there is about 1000 lbs in one bin and it takes 11 lbs of olives to make one liter of oil (about 1 quart). So each bin will produce on average 90 liters of oil. It took almost 4 hours to our amateur crew of 12 people (including 2 using the mechanical arms) to fill up one bin. The best thing about it: we ought to spend an excellent afternoon with very good friends and we finished the day by a very nice dinner and one of the best olive oils I ever tasted!

Paul just told me: “We are working on getting all of our olive oil bottled in time for Christmas.  At this point, the ‘small’ varieties (the ones we make less of) are done – this includes the Coratina, Ascolano, Mission, and Moraiolo.  The Leccino and Frantoio are still in the system.”, you can order it here.