Mechanical olive harvester does its stuff!

“Hobby farm” is the right term for it. Its certainly not a viable business!

You might think 900 olive trees provides a cash flow. The season has just finished, with the olives picked here this week, and its been a dismal one.

A few things went wrong.

We had a solid week of rain the week the trees blossomed. Heavy, persistent rain, and the blossoms rotted quickly. Olives are wind-pollinated, and normally pretty self-reliant, but heavy rain trumps pollen.

In November we had a catastrophic hailstorm. Nearby, two houses were pushed downhill by landslides. We had our guttering ripped off the house, a massive gum tree knocked sideways, and the 15-minute horizontal hailstorm shredded the crop.

In summer we had a six week period of blistering heat and no rain. The olives withered on the tree, and ripened early.

The harvest gets booked in February, and it’s a delicate dance of estimating when the fruit will be ready for picking, and the availability of the contract harvesters, who of course have other clients all clamouring for the same slots in the calendar.

As the crops ripen the currawongs and parrots move in, competing with starlings and bowerbird flocks
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The dried out olives had a respite, with some late heavy rains. Unfortunately, this knocked the olives off the tree, again, and plumped up the remaining olives with water, which watered down the oil content. A good crop can produce up to 20% oil. This year it was about 8%.

By June, there was hardly anything left on the trees. The harvesting team skipped past half the trees as there wasn’t enough on them to pick. That is, their hourly rate for picking would be more than the value of the oil produced.

Our orchard produced some 24 bins in a bumper year three years ago. This year it was eight. That is, three tonnes rather than ten tonnes.

We didn’t handle the harvest ourselves. We got cold feet, calculating a spend of $10k, which we didn’t have. In a normal year that’s a finished production cost of $7-$8 a litre. This year the cost would have panned out to about $20 a litre. So we passed the crop onto another orchard, who paid for the harvest.

So, why do it?

It’s not all bad years. This year was a shocker. Not just for us, a lot of orchards have had similar results this year.

It’s fun. We have a beautiful olive orchard, and there is an enormous amount of satisfaction to be gained from taking a neglected and tired orchard and bringing it back up to a peak. We have a way to go yet, but have made a lot of progress in our first year.

This year was a write-off for us, anyway. We figured Year Zero was a learning year and as long as we didn’t lose money on the farm we’d see it as a good result.

It’s clear that a salaried job is an essential part of keeping this place afloat.