You have probably never thought about olive oil in detail. It just sits beside the balsomic, canola oil, sesame oil and sunflower oil. Here olive oil is used for anything, seeing as butter is considered unhealthy (compared to the French who worship butter).
At the beginning there is a tree. A small, beautiful silvery-green tree. When the trees grow older (like 200 years older), they can get to be quite big, which is what all of the furnature and stuff come from. They plant all of these trees in straight lines along the side of hills and it looks quite stunning when you see fields upon fields.
First, they lay a net along the bottom of a section of trees. Then a person comes with a shaker machine which literally places its hand around the trunk of a tree and shakes it until most of the olives come off. I would think that would harm the tree, but apparantly it works quite well. Finally another person comes along with something that looks like a pitchfork that vibrates back and forth. This is used to get rid of all of the final olives. The net is then rolled up, leaves and olives together.
I expected there to be old-fashioned hand picking, and there was. They save the hand picking for the really big trees that cannot be shaked, and for the olive trees that are on a hill with such a slant that the machines can't get down. The people that I saw picking were all retired men. According to our tour guide, getting manual labour is becoming harder to acquire seeing as young people dislike this type of work because there is no electrical devices used. They used mainly elderly men and imported workers now. They use things that look like mini rakes and something that looks alot like a hair dryer
The two guys who use the machines manage to harvest over 80 hectares in a period of about 3 weeks. I think that that's pretty amazing.
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