olive dreams

The concept was quite simple; buy an old farm in Spain with 3 hectares of land planted with youngish olive trees, keep the land cleared, prune and feed the trees, buy olive nets and a range of hand tools to pick the olives and...

...live a traditional life as olive farmers.

The plan went well, we got the farm as well as another little house to live in whilst we were restoring the farm buildings and when we arrived in February 2004, the olives were just turning black, ready to be picked.

Problem, we didn't have any of the nets, tools, trailer, sacks or the time to pick the olives. So we got a local contractor to pick the olives because we couldn't see them go to waste and in return, we got 15 litres of olive oil. So far so good, but I think that the contractor got the better part of the deal.

More time passed and we were now living at the farm so the next season, 2006, we decided to pick our crop ourselves. We bought a trailer, nets to catch the olives, dinky little plastic rakes to pull the olives off the branches, rubber bowls to scoop them up from the nets and then we set about the harvest. We decided to pace aourselves and so started with the trees which were near to the house, on the more level part of the land and after three days, we were pleased that we had picked a full trailer load.

We proudly set out for an olive mill in the nearby pueblo of Algarinejo and were told to tip the olives into a hopper through some ground level gratings. Our expectations were high and we felt part of an age old, traditional way of life. The mill had been established for decades and had ceramic pictures of the local saint embedded in the walls, the ancient olive handling machinery moved the produce from point to point by rubber belts and the whole ambience was of rural simplicity based on trusted methods and tradition.

Our olives slowly travelled up the belts to be separated from the leaves and stones that we had thoughtlessly included, onward through a water bath to be cleaned and finally past a rustic machine that flicked out the odd olive into a bucket for quality testing. The son of the mill owner took a handful from the bucket, turned it over in his experienced hand and threw it back on to the moving belt. He beckoned us into the office to show us the weight of our labours, where we were brought to earth with a considerable bump.

The whole plant was run by a computer which had weighed our product at 297 kilos, supervised it's sorting and passed it on it's way to a giant hopper where it would be collected by a lorry in the morning with everyone else's crop from that day. Dreams of "Extra Virgin" or individually bottled oil disappeared like smoke in the wind. The final straw was when he wrote out our receipt, he added next to the 17% (oil from olives) the word "industrial". We assumed from this that our carefully picked crop was destined for a fryer in a chip shop in Torremolinos or worse, the sump of a Volkswagen Golf.

We had been instructed to collect our money from the shop in the pueblo the following day and as we thought that this might be a better experience than picking more olives, we duly turned up on time to find the shop closed. A coffee or two later and we were sat in front of "papa" who doled us out the princely sum of 131.41 euros.

The drive back home consisted of mental calculations of the value of our time, gritted teeth and a resolution that "I will never pick another effing olive as long as I live."

So much for the dream...

Time has taught us the following;

• You need more than 3 hectares and a lot more than 270 trees
• You need the skill and experience to prune each tree every year without maiming or killing it
• You need to spend hundreds of euros each year on fertilizer and sprays
• You need to spend thousands of euros on a tractor, ploughing implements, tree shakers, nets, beating sticks, a very large trailer and a team of young, fit people to work it all
• You need agricultural grants to pay for all of the above
• You need to have lived here for all of your life and have taken over your land from your forefathers to know what you are doing and to qualify for the grants

We now consider our beloved trees as just a stand of growing firewood, a purpose for which they seem well suited...