All This for Your Table

Perhaps a bit of news to some of you, though others will already know, but I have always been a farm boy at heart.  I loved my summers as a boy when my brother Dave and I would spend time on our cousins farm in Idaho. We rode horses, drove tractors, swam in the ditch and enjoyed hidden rooms built into the straw stacks by our cousins. My dad had us milking cows during our teenage years as we helped a widow lady provide a living for herself. By the way, milking cows and rebellious teenage years didn't always go together real well, but now looking back I cherish the memories and the opportunities to learn to work.
That is a long way to go to get to this statement, "I am really enjoying my time here on the farm, and the process is thrilling to observe." This is big time farming, from soil to your table basically at one location. Most all the oil produced will be sold to other companies for them to package and market, but I will show you one of our own bottles later.
I love big equipment and trucks. This first piece of equipment is probably a little out dated, you will probably find something real similar at your local gym.

Some old timer had a set of quads.
 







Pruning time. These guys run several tractors
for months to get the work done. Keeping the
trees narrow is important.



Olives ready for harvest. Aren't you glad you don't have
a welfare farm project like this that has to be picked by hand.

Harvest time for these young trees, only about 4 years old.

The white picking fingers massage the tree limbs and the olives
drop onto the belt below and are carried to the hopper.
 

Unloading the harvester and hauling to the mill. This process goes on 24 hours per day for two months. It is a race to finish 7,000 acres of trees before the raining season starts at the end of June.
These next shots are our new mill. It was used this year for the first time and only processed part of our olives.

Olives are dumped into one of two pits on either side of the control room.

Belts convey the olives into distant hopper to start cleaning and crushing, pits and all.

An extractor system like this one, spinning at incredible speed allow for separation of crushed pits, pulp and oil.

This pit remnants resembles a tiny pea gravel and has various uses. We are new enough that we don't have a market for it yet. But we got quite a bit out of the small harvest of this year. Imagine what full production will be like.

The oil is collected and stored waiting for shipment when the price is at it's best. Although this storage looks large, we most likely will fill these tanks close to capacity each season.

 

You are looking down one of two aisles like this. That is a lot of oil for your salad.

And the finished product will mostly be sold under various labels but here is a look at one sporting our own label.

Wow! Is it good oil. The grading process is as complicated as the wine tasting and grading. Special tasters from various companies will visit the plant shopping for oil. There are several criteria that must be met. This is not just your local farmer kind of process. Science and quality control are vital.