The traditional olive picking techniques uses more energy expenditure than modern tree shaking techniques using machinery.

Today olives are picked using something from either the Thunderbirds or Batman with a highly sophisticated system of clamping the tree and applying a vibrating action to dislodge ripened olives.

Traditional olive picking technique

The traditional method of picking olives was very energy intensive that required great core strength and all over fitness to swing a stick for 8 -12 hours per day.
The calorie burn would have been quite high as this is extremely physical work.

As olives hark back to Egyptian times with the migration of olives to the Mediterranean countries such as Italy, Greece and Macedonia their popularity grew.
With increasing demand and the growth of mechanised farming came some very ingenious inventions to streamline the harvesting process.

The advent of pneumatics gave rise to the ability to create the shaking/vibration action that is critical to dislodging the fruit.

Olive shaking machine

Positioning Olive tree for shaking

Lining Up olive tree for shaking

Opening canopy to catch falling olives

Loading collected olives into bins

Bins full of picked olives

The great thing about the shaking process that it doesn’t damage the trees if the trees are clamped correctly.
The risk to the tree is clamping the truck where their is a fork as this will cause a split and ultimately kill the tree.

So with the tree shaking machine able to fill to bins per hour, there is little chance for a person to hand pick more than 2 bins per day.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2011 at 11:45 am by Andrew Talati and is filed under Work Exercise.

Tags: calorie burn, Energy Expenditure, Work Exercise

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.