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| Australian Mum Liz Riley shares her journey with daughter Gwenllian to the family's olive grove last Easter. Here we can learn about how weather and our environment affects the lives of farmers everywhere. After this story you'll never look at a bottle of olive oil in the same way! |
| Olives at Easter |
At our lunch stop on our way to the farm our daughter skinned her knee falling off her pushbike. We arrived at the farm and found that Dad had recently come a cropper off the motorbike and had a grazed face and swollen hand. To make matters worse, after a good wet spring the weather had delivered a punishing hail storm to the olives and then a droughty summer and autumn. The olives in the unirrigated groves were shriveled to various degrees but a preharvest test had determined they were still worth picking.
Easter was late this year and because of the dry weather the olives were ready to pick earlier than usual so the Easter farm visitors were all on harvest duties. The additional labour was a bonus but the uncertainty over yields and quality made some of us wonder whether it was worth the effort.
The olive grove was established between 1990 and 1995 when for a short while there were two generations working the farm. It was at this time that the wool prices plummeted, stockpiled wool was depressing prices and diversification was the proffered answer. Pulses and Canola were the main crop diversifications, fat lambs was at that time a very profitable diversification for the wool growers and olives seemed a possibility as a tree crop. An added bonus of a tree crop was that it could be grown on hilltops that were unsuitable for cultivation and could be grown in the water recharge areas. Dryland salinity is a problem around our area and trees growing on the hills suck up the water that falls there before it has a chance to raise water tables dangerously in the valleys.
Up until this year we have picked mostly by hand, pulling the olives from the trees into a bucket slung around our shoulders. It is slow but social work with several people standing around each tree chatting, as we pick. This year as well as hand picking Dad has bought a catching net and a pneumatic rake that rattles the olives into the net below which in turn funnels the olives into a small bin. This bin and our handpicking buckets are regularly emptied into a crate on the back of the ute. The pneumatic rake works well but is driven by a compressor and is very noisy. This rather shatters the peaceful handpicking experience. Handpicking is very labour intensive and economically a quicker picking method is needed.
We start picking in a grove of 36 trees that Dad has set up with irrigation. These olives are pretty and plump. After half a day's work we have finished the grove and filled the crate on the back of the ute, it holds about 400kg. In the afternoon we move on to the unirrigated groves and the harvest is much reduced.
After an Easter egg hunt in the lounge room on Sunday morning we continue the picking, getting into a bit of a working rhythm, taking turns with the pneumatic rake and noting the variation in quality across the grove and wondering why: "That big Eucalypt probably has roots under these trees", "maybe the ploughed firebreak has allowed better penetration of the rain that has fallen near these trees", "should we really pick this tree? They are so shriveled". "Yes!" comes the answer and on we go.
There are four main varieties of olives in these groves. The Spanish varieties Sevillano and Manzanillo, the American bred Mission and the French bred Verdale. The Verdale was bred as a dual purpose olive for both fruit and oil. It consistently gives us our best oil.
We finish the picking at lunchtime on Monday. Our harvest is two crates plus some baskets and bins. We have probably harvested about a tonne of olives. In the afternoon some of the visitors return home and Dad takes the olives to town. They are loaded onto a truck and driven to the olive press near Lue in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
The picking goes on for about 6 weekends but it is too far for us to go again. I ring Mum a couple of weeks later to see how our batch went. The yield was only 7% which is very low. Olives harvested entirely from irrigated groves are yielding 18%.
But how does it taste? It is beautiful oil, but we won't know if it meets the criteria for extra virgin until the tests come back from the lab. Mum and Dad still have a couple of weekends of picking to go and they are getting weary.
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The Ploughman's Hill Harvest 2006
By Liz Riley
NSW, Australia |
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| Liz with daughter Gwenllian |
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| The net and pneumatic rake in the foreground with handpickers in the background. |
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| Irrigated olives in the crate on the back of the ute. |
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