Panic at the Olive Mill in Provence Fran ce

[rox]

Grrrr what a time we are having this year. First off as I posted in the Related Topics Forum a while back our life has not been going that great lately. Regardless of that mess, the olive trees are ready to be picked and we have to focus on that. It is a great year for olives, everybody has olives, the trees are heavy and it is going to be the best harvest since 1991, at least that is what the mill tells me. I knew it was going to be a good harvest because a lot of people farm bare, meaning they don't irrigate. The last two years bare farming produced jsut that, nothing. However this eyar the rains fell just right so I knew it would be a bountiful harvest.

Now the problem is the mills can't keep up! In order to produce the high premium olive oil you need to press the olives within one day or if it is really cool to cold 2 days. One day is better though. The first 3 weeks of picking were fine, it rained and so nobody picked except my silly husband and myself outside picking in our raincoats. We took our olives tot he mill and they were pressed that night. We always pick by variatal, first we pick the Salonenque olives then the Grossane, then the Bouteillan and finish with the Aglandau. My husband and I picked by ourselves with my father helping the last 2 days all our Salonenque. Can we say the Salonenque is a tough row to hoe? These are the trees that grow on our most narrow terraces and it requires a lot of extra netting plus jsut going up and down the steep hillsides etx. Well anyway we got it done which is about 20% of our crop, all by ourselves.

Now comes great weather and everybody is out picking like mad. Last week we had over froneds of ours who work for free, jsut to help us. It is great one friend is our main cook and the other wife is a cooks helper. Two men plus myself my husband and my father and we are shaking the olives off the tree like nobody's business. Scheduled to sttart jsut this last Satrurday was 2 nephews and a niece, they all took vacation time to work on the harvest. The young people we pay the friends are so gracious they jsut work for some olive oil. As soon as the weather turned great the mill told us to stop picking and not bring any more olives until Saturday. Boy my husband was ticked off, me too, but we stopped for a day and a half.

Satruday I go to the mill with the first of 4 loads and guess what? The mill is still loaded in olives, they were jsut as full as before. So now I'm really ticked off! We had free labor good weather nice flat fields with long lines of trees to pick, we stopped picking yet when we get to t he mill they obviously still accepted olives from others. I was there about 9:30am with our load and the father and daughter (she runs the mill) were talking and they decided to close down the mill for 2 days and not take olvies from anybody. They needed to press the backlog. Then they tell us not to bring any more olives until Thursday fo this week. The pickers they hired for thier 6,000 trees were in fact prunning the grape vnes and not picking thier olives either.

Geesh I sure didn't want to brinh that bad news home to my husband, we were stopped the previous week for a day and a half and now I had to go tell him to stop the 2 nephews from shaking we couln't bring any more olives to the mill until Thursday that the Mill was shut down from accepting olives until Monday afternoon and the mill told all the major producers to wait until Thursday.

It isn't as if we were not under a lot of stress wtiht eh US financial situation now our harvest is going bust. What would end up is that all our help excpet for one nephew who will work longer ,has this week to pick (plus our friends who who were here since Wed the previous week they were giving us 10 days) so when we finally could pick olives all our help would be gone and my hsuband and I would have to do it by ourselves. Then we have to worry about us not being able to work fast enough and the olives over maturing.

The panic at the mill mad a big panic on our farm. Some how between that first load at 9:30 on Saturday morning and the last load that my husband took the owners decided that we could start pickign on Monday and bring in our olives on Tuesday afternoon. Talk about preferential treatment!!! Woo Hooo!!! This mill has always treated us really right. They have us I think as their number one client. Every day when I bring in the first load of the day I go look for our oil from yesterday and verify that it got pressed. On Saturday ont he last load the mill manager told my hsuband, "Tell Roxanne that th eolvies you brought in today will be pressed today" I'm smiling like a cheshire cat. All those pallet boxes of olives they got backed up yet they put ours to the front of the line.

I think there is 2 reasons for this. I think the number one reason is that we have won so many numerous awards with our oil. They know that we absolutly want and need our olives to be pressed right away because we enter our oil in a lot of competitions and win I might add We get a pretty good amount of press and I always have the reports mention the name of our mill in the newspaper articles and I know for certain the the mill owners see that. Plus our national olive growers association send out e-mails with competition results and I know they get those. Being selected as the best Oil in France in 2008 in the biggest International Olvie Oil competition puts some extra bargaining power in our hands.

So we wnet from a Saturday morning disaster to a victory. We still lost half a day Saturday and all day Sunday picking but as I write this a full crew is out there picking Monday morning we will take them to the mill Tuesday and they will be pressed Tuesday. We had a little setback but it looks like we will be okay.

Because they closed the mill on Saturday I was able to take some pictures. I think I'll do seperate posts with the pictures so I can explain them a bit. Oh one more thing. Those Salonenque olives my husband and I picked first, in five years we have never had such a delicious Salonenque Olive Oil. It is our best Salonenque ever. We are now picking the Grossane and it also is very very good. All the Grossane should be picked by tomorrow night I hope.

 

[rox]

Pic #1 is our Mercury Mountaineer loaded with crates of olives. We dump our olives into the pallet boxes you can see in the photos.
Pics #2 & 3 are showing pallet boxes full of olives as they sit outside wating to be pressed

I would like you to nice the absolutly clear blue sky shown in the first pic. You can see that it was a perfect day to pick olives.
We have a beautiful day and they say, "Stop pickign olives!" Sheesh...

 

[rox]

Nest pics are inside the mill pics. First the pallet boxes are dumped on a conveyor, a vaccuum sucks up the leaves and blowes them outside to a trailor (pic on that to follow) they get spay washed to get the field dust off, then crushed beween to big grinding plates (pitts and all) then the pate of ground up olives is kneeded in a maloxer. Then the pulp is squeezed with the pulp being extracted and pumped outside (pics of that in next post) and the juice piped into a centrifuge. The cnetrifudge spins and seperates the oil from the water.

Notice a couple things in these pictures. Number one is how clean our mill is! That is really important. They need to clean out the grinding plates and equipment or rotten olive paste build up and ruins the flovor of the oil. Whne the mills are swamped it is very easy to jsut keep on pressing and pressing and pressing and let the cleaning go. I like this mill becuase it is very very clean and you don't find a lot of them this clean.

 

[rox]

These next pics are some of the machinary, including tractors!, that are used int he mill operation. All the ground up paste is pumped into spreaders and spread back into the fields as compost.

You can see some big plastic storage tanks that are customer tanks and they jsut open up the window and stick the hose outside into the tanks
Space is at a premium inside the mill.

One trailor holds the leaves that are blown out and the other trailor holds the paste. The massey ferguson is shown hooked up to the trailors. The last pic is of a Massey Ferguson parked by the vines with it's load of olive compost .

 

[rox]

Maybe you can only attach 3 pics or something, so I'll add the pic from the outside equipment here, this pics shows the paste being sent to the trailor for spreading. Then there is a blurry pic of my dad and the mill manager, she is a young woman in her early 30's quite beautiful and a very very good manager.

Finally a pic of my 84 yar old father who flys over for the harvest to help. We bottle most of our oil at the mill but take a lot of it home in these plastic barrels. We have big 300 liter stainless stell tanks in our basement and we use these plastic tanks my dad is washing to transport and when we need to we also use them for storage. These tanks are a bear to clean, ther is jsut one 3 inch hole to work through and olive oil really is hard to clean. I rigged up a crutch with a washcloth wired to the end of the crutch that my dad uses to clean our transport tanks. We use a special cleaner which we get form the mill which cuts the olive oil and is also approved as food grade. Everything we do here we have to be very careful to use only food grade tanks and products etc. l

To use the approved detergent it has to be mixed with boiling waer so my dad keeps big pots of boiling water goin ont he stove and every day cleans these tanks for us. He got here November 5th and he is almost done. It is quite a lot of work and time to clean one of these tanks. First he takes it to a back shower stall and rinses with hot water and shakes the tanks. Then goes in the hot boiling water the detergent and more shaking and scrubbing with the crutch (the crutch idea works great because it has a handle so you can control the scrubbing better) then another hot rinse, if not clean more boiling water, then another hot rinse, then a cold rinse. I think my dad will be done with about 30 of these transport tanks tomorro or the next day. It is a real horrible job to do and my husband and I are grateful my dad jsut comes over and does this for us. When he is not scrubbing tanks he pickes out the larger branches from the olvie and also pulls nails out of the nets. My dad is 84 and he works all day and most importantly he wants to work all day. he is happiest when he is working and is very un happy if he doesn't ahve anything to dol.

 

[rox]

These are pictures of the saturday lunch, I was hauling olives so they started without me, I got there in time for desert which was a home made custard. Our main cook is the woman at the table serving and our cooks helper is shown in a pic by herself. They did save my meal for me and it was so good. Belgium endive wrapped with ham in a betcheml (like a white sauce with cheese) sauce with potatoes and another hot food I cna't remember plus cheese and desert. Everybody here is always very interested in their food and has opinions of what is the best way to cook this or that. Trust me the French don't work very well if they are not well feed with good home made food.

I got a few minutes this morning where I am ahead of the game becaue of not working on Saturday anfternoon or Sunday so I could post this for ya'all. Normally I don't have time to take pictures of the mill etc.

I hope the rest of our oil turns out as good as what we picked so far. I also know with all the mills being backed up (I went to another mill to see if they had any capapcity and they were also a mod scene) that there is going to be only a few producers who get prefererentail treatment and get their olives pressed right away who are going to have the top oils. We hope again this year we are one of those.

 

[Egon]

Thanks for all the pictures Rox.

 

[B8FISH]

Nice pics! Glad to see that you have so much help--and from the family too! Nice.

 

[Doc_Bob]

My dad is 84 and he works all day and most importantly he wants to work all day. he is happiest when he is working and is very un happy if he doesn't ahve anything to dol.

Amen! Nice pics.
Bob

 

[MarkV]

Rox,

You need to set up one of those adventure/working vacations for tourist during picking season. You know, pay a lot of money for the experience of picking olives in France. Fine wine, local cuisine, cooking classes of regional dishes, tours of the area, tour the pressing mill and you go home with a case of olive oil you helped pick. That type of thing is very popular in some circles.

MarkV

 

[rox]

Rox,

You need to set up one of those adventure/working vacations for tourist during picking season. You know, pay a lot of money for the experience of picking olives in France. Fine wine, local cuisine, cooking classes of regional dishes, tours of the area, tour the pressing mill and you go home with a case of olive oil you helped pick. That type of thing is very popular in some circles.

MarkV

Gee wouldn't that be a hoot, people pay us to pick our olives...
I just don't think my husband has the temperment for that. There is a lot to learn and although it is not difficult to learn it I think he is jsut tired of training people from his being many years a chef.

To everyone else I hope you enjoyed the thread and thanks for your comments.

 

[WBWI]

Rox, thanks for the pictures. How do you bottle the olive oil? Do you have any pictures of that operation? The company I work for manufactures bottling equipment for the dairy industry and I'm always interested in how other industries do the packaging.

 

[Tig]

Great story Rox.

 

[pennwalk]

Rox,
I wish I was there to see it all and taste your great olive oil. Thanks for sharing.

Chris

 

[rox]

Rox, thanks for the pictures. How do you bottle the olive oil? Do you have any pictures of that operation? The company I work for manufactures bottling equipment for the dairy industry and I'm always interested in how other industries do the packaging.

If I get a chance when we bottle at the mill and most importantly if I remember to bring the camera I'
ll take some pics. Actually the bottle filling machines don't cost that much. What costs are the capping machines. At home we have a bottle filling machine that works off a vaccuum system. It creates a vaccuum in the bottle and fills until the liquid reaches the point where the filling tube is.

Speaking of bottles here is how the empty bottles for olive oil are stored temporarily. You'll never believe it. They are just stored outside. The pallets are all wrapped in plastic and because every bit of space is needed inside the mill during pressing the bottles are kept outside for a while. And I did think to take a pic of that. Again notice the clear blue sky and what a nice day it would have been to pick olives. Saturday and Sunday were lovely, really lovely days to pick olives. Today is also nice 55f but with a bit of wind. It is harder to work with wind because when you shake the olives off the tree they go flying and don't end up on the nets so you loose olives. Second it is much harder to work with the nets since you are fighting the wind.

 

[rox]

Oh one more thing about the big harvest. There is a sign up at the mill saying that due to the large harvest they will not be buying oil from producers. Well I'm sure they would buy our oil if we were selling it and they will buy oil from a few others but since they have so much oil the smaller farmer who has perhaps 300 or 400 liters of oil as thier main crop is not olives, they are not going to buy from them this year. My husband and I fugured out real quick that we wanted to develope our own brand and not rely on jsut being farmers and selling everything to the mill. Then the mill has you by the short hairs as what are you supposed to do with your oil then? We didn't like the risk of having just one customer, the mill. We worked and developed a good customer base and now we have spread our risk around. We have a good crop and a good amount of oil (or we will when we are done) and we will keep all our oil and not sell any to the mill. This fall we had to tell customers to wait for the new crop as we were out, this year I have added on two really good distributors and so we should be good to go, enough oil and should again be able to sell all our oil independently.

I don't like to be beholding to a mill, if I don't get treated right, if my olives are not pressed right away then I want to be able to go to a mill that will. Our old mill our farmer friend Lucien they ahve not even paid him completely for last years oil! I hated having to beg the mill for our money so we developed our own customers and changed mills. With our new mill we did sell oil to them one year to help defray the cost of the pressing but this year we keep all our oil. When I sold her our oil she opened up her checkbook and paid on the spot! Hey I like that!!! Our milling expense this year is going to be around 10,000 euros. It is a lot more work to go out and find customers for your oil, it is easy to just sell to the mill but I would rather do the work and control our own destiny than be dependent.

I gotta go I won't have any more time to post unless it is real late at night and I'm not to tired so don't feel bad if I dont' relpy. I will when i get a chance.

 

[Bird]

Very interesting and educational, Rox. Thanks for both the information and photos.

 

[dmccarty]

Rox,

Glad to here things are working out and that you will have more oil. We are down to our last bottle so we will have to reorder soon. I knew you did not have a lot of oil this year so I was getting worried about how we would get our fix. We had some of the oil last night on some pasta. Just the oil on the pasta. Smoked some pork loin and had some corn. Put the oil on the corn too.

Yum.

Later,
Dan

 

[AlanB]

Thanks Rox, cool, reminds me an awful lot of the grapes and Wine from SWMBO house.

It is nice to have the times when things do slide your way sometimes.

I would not doubt a bit that what Mark V suggested could work, little marketing, and make it expensive, and honestly what a great opportunity for someone.

Hope it all works out smoothly for you.

 

[denmansoft]

Rox:
How and when can we get some of your oil? Do we have to come over and buy direct from your farm?(maybe spring 2009?) My wife and son are always looking for the best oil they can get. They're the chefs, I just help getting the ingredients and of course, enjoy the results.

Home cooked family dinners in France just blew me away when we were over there!

Ian