I just poured myself some of this year’s freshly milled olive oil. The new oil is green and pungent and I am so happy that we were able to squeeze in harvest between the heavy rain and the sub-freezing temperatures. Of course, as is often true of farming, we didn’t escape entirely unscathed. Because of the rain, the olives were wet and some wet leaves snuck in with the harvested olives. The leaves slowed down milling, which I’m sure frustrated our wonderful miller, Mike Madison. He said it took him roughly twice as long to mill this year. Sorry, Mike!
On a more positive note, however, we successfully applied mechanical harvesting techniques to our own operation. We harvested this year, for the first time, with a tree shaker. As many of you know, Gold Oak Ranch grows mainly walnuts and almonds. Like virtually all nut growers, we use tree shakers to harvest. But we’ve never used a tree shaker to harvest olives. Conventional wisdom, at least in California, says that tree shakers “bark” olive trees. In plain-speak, that means that tree shakers damage the bark, which can injure or kill the tree.
And so it was with some trepidation that we decided to submit our prize-winning oil producing trees to the shaker. But the news was good! Yes, we did bark a couple of trees, but we managed to harvest in half the time with fewer men. And a relatively high percentage of olives fell off the tree. In other words, the shaker successfully liberated the olives from the branches. Happily, the olives showed almost no damage from the fall to earth.
A word about the barked trees. The barking occurred when we shook branches. Not all of our trees had trunks suitable for shaking. Some trees had short trunks that bifurcated into large branches relatively close to the ground. We were forced to shake the branches, and that’s when the damage occurred. The key to successfully harvesting olives with a tree shaker is to train the tree so that it has an appropriate trunk. When we planted our leccino trees we weren’t thinking about shaking them, but I can tell you, with the baby trees out in the orchard, we’re definitely thinking about training their trunks early on!
Tags: California olive oil, olive harvesting, olive tree shaking
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