The world’s biggest olive oil producer has said prices of so-called “liquid gold” are set to halve, bringing relief for families who have faced years of soaring food costs.
Spanish olive oil maker Deoleo said the worst of the weather-fuelled crisis gripping the industry appeared to be over.
The company predicts prices will halve from an all-time high in coming months, with the harvest for this season on track to be significantly better than last year.
Sitting in the middle of, as I do, thousands of acres of olive plantations this does seem to be true. Those harvesting machines are off and doing their thing.
Those machines are actually rather fun too.
You can see one in action here:
That imagery we all have, of gnarly thousand year old trees spread around a grove. That’s not how industrial production is done at all. You’ve got to have rows and rows of much smaller trees these machines can deal with.
To harvest the old plantations it used to be a net laid on the ground around the tree then hit it with a stick. Or, more modern, one of these:
Sorta tickle them out. V labour intensive.
Which does lead to oddity. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of old trees around. There are 50 in a field a block away. Roadside verges have them. There’s one in the corner of my garden. Which simply don’t get harvested at all. Maybe Gramps takes the kids out to show how it used to be done. There are still collective mills – the things that Thales cornered the market in in 450 BC -ish which gave us the first commodity corner in all history and perhaps the last one that made a profit – all over the place. Take your prepared olives in, get the juice back minus a chunk for the miller.
But it’s a dying activity. These past couple of decades in fact. Those machines, those new plantations, that’s where the stuff on your shelves comes from.
Modern grap harvesters are very similar ( if not the same ) devices. They use them where I used to live in Austria. Hypnotic to watch and astonishingly gentle with the fruit.
Pandering to my obsession, it doesn’t look as though a battery driven harvester would be a good idea.
In Jaen Province, I’ve seen nets laid under the trees, and then an automated shaker arrives on a tractor, grips the tree trunk and shakes it until the fruit falls. Possibly, not that good for the tree roots…
All right on flat land. But hereabouts, farmers farm both sides of the same acre.
This is why I’m inclined to not too vigoursly object to the long-term destruction of the family farm method of farming that Labour seem intent on. Centuries of experience have told us that agriculture works with large system/small worker combos, not scraping a living out of a handkerchief. I grow my own potatoes for the excercise and to keep the garden tidy, no way do I grow them ‘cos it’s cheaper.
The farms around our way are moderately sized, mostly a few hundred acres. A lot of the work is done by contractors who have bigger machinery that can work a whole field in a surprisingly short time.
” an automated shaker arrives on a tractor, grips the tree trunk and shakes it until the fruit falls.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DPYSeR2NeY
Lol
That tree shaker looks like it was designed by Gerry Anderson
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RExB_UuxD8I
I remember seeing hundreds of old and obviously uncared-for olive trees in middle of nowhere Slovakia.
There’s a dissertation in how and whether rural time-rich money-poor Slovakians started harvesting them again, given the last few years eye-watering prices.
My beloved has bought a little fig tree. Will I need to defend it from squirrels? Foxes? Rats? Muntjac? Dickybirds?
(Last year a bloody fox scoffed all our carefully netted strawberries. This year a pair of ultrasonic scarers kept the brute away.)
Who is going to bring down the cost of Popeye?
Still do it the old fashioned way here – net on the ground and then ‘tickle’ the Olives out with a long stick although when I was in the ‘Occupied Areas’ a couple of weeks back I did see a farmer with a battery-powered ‘tickler’…
Grapes are still harvested manually too…
When I came here in 2002, Carobs were just left to rot on the trees, more recently they have been harvested using a net/stick to bring them down.
We have a lot of carob growing around BiG’s Kiez for some reason. It also just rots, though usually on the ground.
Maybe in future we will be eating it, make a nice sauce or garnish for freshly trapped urban squirrel.
My beloved has bought a little fig tree. Will I need to defend it from squirrels? Foxes? Rats? Muntjac? Dickybirds?
Wasp magnets… 🙁
Are the structural factors cited in the article (poor weather in other years) also going to push down prices of other foods? Southern Europe grows a lot of tomatoes, citrus fruits, grapes, etc.
In the USA, our federal tax collectors use very similar machines.