Modern Harvest

Modern Picking

Modern olive harvest for the olive canning industry still relies on hand picking as the primary means of harvest. Since canning olives are picked green for maximum firmness and require delicate handling to preserve their cosmetic appearance, hand picking is the most effective and efficient means of harvest. Green olives cling too tightly to their stems to be swatted or shook and olives can bruise when they fall on the ground.

Therefore, pickers working in the canning industry carefully remove the olives from the tree and place them into a lugbox, or picking bucket, as illustrated here. Although it is the most expensive of all harvest techniques, many olive oil producers still rely on hand picking to harvest their crop.

When harvesting for the olive oil industry, olives are harvested later in the growing season, often when they are ripe. Cosmetic appearance of the olive is far less important since the olives will be crushed in order to extract their oil. Thus, harvesting for olive oil can be done by shaking or swatting the trees.

To harvest by swatting, tarps are laid beneath the trees and the trees are swatted with long poles. The olives that are knocked loose fall on to the tarps below. The tarps are then gathered and the olives contained in them are dumped into wooden bin which will carry the olives to the oil mill.

It requires a great deal of man power to harvest olives either by hand or by swatting. The cost of harvest is one of the major contributors to the cost of a bottle of olive oil. In order to keep costs low, many producers are searching for more efficient methods of mechanical harvesting.