WARNING - Long Post about life on the olive farm.
Please skip if you enjoy shorter posts!!!
You wrote- I find these posts on the olive biz fascinating. What was it like going from systems in the States to a French olive farmer?
My reply- what was it like? Well actually not all that much different. As a Systems Analyst, and I mainly gathered information and wrote requirements for software development, almost all my work was simply listening, analyzing and logic.
Because neither my husband nor myself knew anything about olive farming, and we didn't do any research at all on it, I find that the same skills I used in my software work are transfereabel to farming. I listen (listen) to the consultants we hired, I listen to the other farmers who are our freinds, I listen to the chemical/fertilizer salesman; I go out and look at the trees and see if I have the pests they described (analyze), and I use quite a bit of logic (logic) to figure out how to do the task at hand with the least amount of effort.
Perhaps after we have been doing this a number of years and everything is routine it won't be as satisfying. But since day one my husband and and I (everywhere I wrote "I" above should really be "we,") are challenged mentally and physically. We are learning, and that keeps the mind active and young. We are learning something together that we neither one of us knew anything about. I love to learn.
I was a little bit heavy at 130lbs and 5'7," I was always a very thin gal, and I made up my mind that when I got to the olive farm I would welcome exercise, I would welcome the physical work. It was very hard walking up the hills with the hand tools and what not, I usually had to take a break half way up. When my muscles were hot and I was short of breath I just did self talk. I would say, "This is good for you, you are going to get so much stronger and healthier" So instead of hating the exertion I talked myself into believing it was good for me. I would say, "This is so good for you" It really does work. It is all mental.
I can carry cases of olive oil with no problem at all now. In particular my arm muscles are getting pretty strong. When we first moved here I hated the fact that the first floor of the house is the garage and I needed to walk up a flight of stairs to get into our home. Now I don't even think about it, up I go like nothing.
The big improvement in my life has been the physical improvement, I was so sedentary and now I'm not. I know that this more physical lifestyle will be very very good for me when I get much older than my early 50's.
It is great to have your own hours. I'm not a morning person and never have been. I rarely start the day before 10am. Now for a farmer that might be slacking, but that is what I like. Even during the harvest when we hire in help, everybody is out there working at 8am sharp except me. I finally wore my husband down this second harvest and he has accepted the fact that I am not going to get out there before 9am.
With olive farming nothing is really time critical. If you don't plow for weeds this week, you can do it next week. About the only thing that is time critical is that you have to spay pesticide when the trees have a pink bud. But even that is not OMG we have to do it today. They stay in pink bud for a week or so. Since we only have 12 acres it takes my hubby a day and a half to spray.
Even picking the olives is not that time critical. Actually you can pick from November though January and early February. We pick ours early because we like the flavor of the oil from picking earlier. If you pick later there is absolutely nothing wrong with that you just have a different flavor to the oil.
A farmer friend told us that it works out to be that you work about one week a month. Now that is not that bad.
Initially there was a lot of work, especially with designing our label, creating marketing materials, building the website, regular marketing to find customers, figuring out all different kinds of freight available. Heck freight is a nut all by itself. Designing signs finding printers etc. But the big push is over and now, now I mainly spend my office time improving on things. There is not as much pressure as was the first year.
I do have language issues because I don't really speak all that much French. However I just stuck with it, and was patient and waited for my husband to translate to fill in missing blanks for me. I never had a business partner before so this is a new experience having my husband as my business partner. We had some...discussions /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif... but we figured out how to work together and stay happy.
I tried making olives the first year, but it didn't work. Basically you put the raw olives in a big vat and fill it with salt and water, then you have to change the water every few days. Well the vats were to heavy for me to lift up and dump out the water (guess I'm not such a good analyst after all or I would have figured that out in advance). So basically I abandoned the project. We figured that in order to make olives in quantity we would need to get containers that had a spigot at the bottom to drain the water. So that was on our list to buy until we found out about the man who makes your olives for you, just bring him the olives and in a few weeks pick them up. To heck with it, I'm going to go to him, he is a specialist, his olives are awesome, a farmer friend gave us a pail of his olives, so that is the olive plan for this years harvest. I almost forgot. Our farmer friend gave us his best recipe for making olives. He says, throw them in a wood case, like wholesale vegetables come, throw some large grain sea salt on them and put them under an olive tree for a month or so. Just keep checking on them until they are done. I was so embarrassed, I was all gun ho about making olives, and my olives we threw out and my husband's, which was the box under the olive tree, his were wonderful!!! His were black olives, my recipe was for green olives. We are definitely going to make more black olives this year. What an easy recipe.
What I did get done, which was a PIA, was I did get an FDA Number and I can import food. It is a whole big rig a marole process, you have to send them prior notice of the shipment arriving but you can't send it too early nor too late. I also have a US Customs number.
It does work out really well that since I am more of a night owl, all the work I have to do with USA happens in the late afternoon and at night in France because of the time difference, so that works out superb for me.
Figuring out the above was all a learning experience, and it is interesting.
Here is what we do to raise olives.
We only have 12 acres with 1,350 large trees-
January - spray a copper product on the trees, throw about 3 cups of fertilizer on each tree, & fill bottles of oil, & sell oil!
February - rotottill, spray the almond trees when they have pink bud.
March - Prune olive trees, burn the small branches and cut big branches into firewood.
April - Prune olive trees, burn the small branches and cut big branches into firewood.
May - Turn on the irrigation system and lay out the hoses on the fields where we rolled them up; spray the olive trees when they have pink bud.
June- might rototill depending on the weeds, last year we hand weeded all 12 acres! clean out brush and weeds from the stone walls etc. Watch for pests, might need to go around and spray, if there are pests.
July - pick almonds, set traps for olive fly and monitor traps. If the olive fly shows up spray the southeast side of the trees.
August - pull off the suckers form the bottoms of the trees. Throw about 3 cups of granular fertilizer at each tree. Monitor for olvie fly, spray if they show up. Don't spray if they don't.
September- rototill, shut down the irrigation system. Hand pick olives one by one, for olives that are used for making table olives.
October - Now you can finally burn (you are not allowed to burn all summer long here), so you spend a good amount of time burning all the brush you have cleared and piled. Check all equipment that is needed for harvest, get ready, it is coming.
November - All month harvest.
December - finish harvest the first week of December to say around the 8th to the 12th. Repair nets and put away. Roll up some irrigation hoses on a few fields, but not all fields.
In between times we mainly cut down trees and bushes that are overgrown, anything that is shading the olive trees gets cut. My husband spends a fair amount of time cutting all the stuff we cut down into firewood. And of course there is always taking customer orders bottling, and arranging freight.
We have a lot of friends and family visit and we always have time for them except when we are picking almonds or olives. We have a brand new guest house ont he olive farm and we rent that out for holiday rentals as well as our condo in Cannes so that keeps me hopping since I handle that.
That is basically what we do over here.
I think I even wrote more than CT Guy and that is a challenge! ( /forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif CT guy)
