🧺 Olive harvest

The olive harvest is the picking of olive fruit from the trees for oil or for table olives. In the Northern Hemisphere olives for oil are picked from October to April, and in the Southern Hemisphere from April to July. Italian protected designations usually require the harvest to end between 10 December and 31 January.

Until the 1980s olives all over the world were picked by hand. The fruit was stripped by hand, knocked down with sticks or combed with rakes onto nets spread under the tree. One person picks about 80 kilograms a day, so hand labour accounts for half or more of the costs in the field. Green table olives are still picked by hand, because machines bruise them.

Today shakers do the work: the machine grips the trunk or a branch and shakes it, and the fruit falls onto a sheet spread below. Dense hedgerow orchards are picked by harvesters that drive over the row and take almost the whole crop.

The time of harvest changes the oil. Early green fruit gives a more bitter and more pungent oil with bright grassy notes, and once the fruit turns purple its phenolic compounds drop sharply. Picked olives must be processed within one to three days, or the acidity rises and the taste is spoiled. Fruit damaged during picking also gives poorer oil.