Harvesting

Hand Picking

Throughout time olives have been picked by hand with buckets and ladders and often aided by such equipment as sticks and rakes to knock the olives off the trees teamed with canvas mats for collection.

Nowadays growers still rely on hand picking for a number of reasons:
- to maximize fruit quality (for pickled varieties)
- trees too young for mechanical harvesting
- trees unable to handle mechanical harvesting due to pruning or spacing
- can’t afford mechanical harvesting equipment

Premium Table Olives

Eden Valley harvests all its table olives by hand, (until recently where mechanical harvesting on table fruit has produced excellent results), to maximize its fruit quality. Although hand picking is time consuming, we are able to obtain a superior product that’s firmer with more flesh and less imperfections. Hence we can value add to this premium product and our customers love the quality of the bigger, fleshier olives.

Labour Force

Eden Valley is ideally situated to make use of a large itinerant labour force that is already established to service the local grain and cotton industry. The seasons for both of these industries do not clash with the olive industry timetable.

The grove utilises its on-farm accommodation and employs local, interstate and backpackers for seasonal work such as picking, pruning and olive sorting.