The end of the Christmas season used to mark the best time to harvest our olives. And this year was not an exception. Beside the 250 acres of vines, Quevedo farms 50 acres of organic olive trees. Since 2003 we are growing our olives free of any chemical and farming in an integrated organic process. We have around 2,000 trees with 70 to 150 years old and around 2,500 between 2 and 10 years old.
Thus, during these weeks we have left the pruning shears at home and we have been dedicated to olive harvesting. Traditionally we used to use long sticks with which harvesters manually shaken the boughs and made the olive fall over a device called the oli-net, wrapped around the trunk of the tree and opened to form an umbrella-like catcher. This year we decided to introduce a new technology to harvest the olives. We are using a vibration harvester, which shakes the boughs, dislodging the olive fruit in few seconds. It definitively creates some vibration in the trunk but seems not to affect the heath of the olive tree. We have studied the effects of this harvester and we concluded no major damage was caused to the tree on the weeks and months after the harvest. The video helps to explain how this works.
To make a liter of olive oil, this year, we need around 6.5 kilograms of olive fruit. We expect to make around 4.000 liters of organic olive oil this year, slightly higher than last year. The younger olive trees produce more and more each year and the older ones keep their low yield and concentrated fruit.
Take a look at the video. What you think about this process?
Oscar Quevedo
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