Olive Processing

In late November/early December, most farmers on Lesvos are harvesting their olives. The fruit on the Tragakis farm ripens later than the fruit on flat land at lower altitude (and Dimitris is more worried about his photovoltaic project than the harvest), so I didn't see too much collection, but we did enough to get an idea of what goes on. 

Most of the work is done by an electric rake that shakes the olives down from the trees into the waiting nets. We try to speed up the process picking by hand, but it's not very effective.

After a couple trees, we use the nets to gather all the olives together, then pick out the worst of the leaves and branches before shoveling the fruit into sacks--heavy sacks.

The sacks go to an olive press in town, maybe 10km away. Dimitris has plans for building his own small press, but in the meantime he relies on his friend's plant.

The inside of a modern olive press. Olive oil is the only oil (I think) that is extracted through purely mechanical processes.

A conveyor belt lifts the olives from the initial hopper.

The olives are being--washed? I think?

Now this is washing--definitely washing. And somewhere in between, all the leaves and junk were blown out. There's a crazy vent in the side of the building, covered by a cage with olive leaves plastered all over it.

This is the modern method of stirring the olive pulp to allow the oil droplets to  join together. The paste is actually much more green, but I couldn't get any sort of focus when I tried the photo without flash.

The old-fashioned method, three huge millstones.

 The old method of pressing the olives was in burlap envelopes. The new method involves big, shiny metal devices that didn't make for good pictures.

Filtration.

Pure olive oil.

 Then and now: how the massive quantities of Greek olive oil are stored.

This is the oil for our personal use. It's crazy how much it's used here--anything cooked automatically has olive oil added to it: vegetables, pasta, salad, rice, eggs. Even the dog food is cooked with olive oil.