The Harvest Work Olive’r Do

ALTAMURA

(Bear with us, this covers three weeks!) After blowing through countless cities (and Euros), we were ready to turn off the tourist track and get some cultural immersion.  It was the moment we’d been anticipating for the last month, both with excitement and with total fear.  We had signed up for a work exchange harvesting olives to make oil in Puglia, the heel of Italy.  After a few brief and broken-up Skype calls over the last few weeks with our soon-to-be host, Tonio, we knew just enough about the situation to be nervous.  We knew the work would be “very hard, no joke,” with no days off except for rain, and that we would be working and living with another volunteer couple from Australia.  

AND SO IT BEGINS

Before we had time to emotionally prepare, we had arrived in Altamura, our new home for the next few weeks. We were scooped up by Tonio for some introductions over coffee, and learned that our experience was going to be different than we’d imagined. We wouldn’t be living in the countryside; we would be in an apartment right in the middle of town, driving out to do the harvesting. And we would be sharing that apartment with Tonio, his parents, and the Australian volunteers. Also, the Azienda Creanza wasn’t a single large orchard, but a collection of 8 or so orchards varying from 50 to 300 trees spread out around the county, some of which had been bought and sold multiple times for a couple centuries, and others had been hand planted by Tonio’s father almost 50 years ago.  We were also surprised to learn that we wouldn’t be surrounded by Italian language like we had hoped – Tonio regretfully informed us that his family mostly speaks English when the volunteers are there.

So, that night, we went to the kitchen to give Tonio’s parents a thank-you gift for hosting us.  We were shocked to find out that not only do Marcantonio and Grazia not speak English with the volunteers, they don’t speak English at all. 

When dinnertime came, we thought they’d prepared a fancy welcome dinner for us, but we later realized it was just their Sunday routine to have a big meal with the whole family.  It’s really easy for them to get together, because three generations of the Creanza family all live in the same building. And so, we met the cast of characters that would fill our next month:

Tonio, our host:  He splits his time now between Altamura with his extended family half the year and his wife and two year old son in Vancouver for the rest.

Carl & Tennille: The other volunteer couple from Brisbane, who had been working in a wood-fired pizza van in England prior to their arrival. We soon found out that Tennille didn’t like tomatoes or most meats, which made every Southern Italian meal an obstacle. (More on this in the next post!)

Marcantonio: The hard to love lovable grandfather whose worked on a farm his whole life, even for the formative years while he should've been in school. 

Grazia: Tonio's mother who we were frightened of for the first week and a half.  

Giuseppe: Tonio's older brother, he works a desk job for the equivalent of the department of agriculture all week then helps with the family farms on weekends. He's half machine, half machine.

Rosana: Giuseppe’s wife, spunky and positive with enough enthusiasm to make up for the language barrier.

Grazia & Rosalba: Giuseppe and Rosana’s shy daughters, who knew more English than the rest of Tonio’s family combined.

Marco: Grazia and Rosalba’s brother, who was so absent that we thought he was a visiting cousin who didn’t live in the building.

Bianca: The family dog, who reminded us so much of Fiona. 

The next morning we were off to the oliveto (olive orchard) in la campagna (countryside).

We had been tasked with buying a work jacket, work boots and gloves before arriving in Altamura, but as our start date approached we talked ourselves into improvising work outfits out of our packed clothes.  Tonio did take us to the hardware store to buy gloves, and we were glad we hadn’t bought them ahead of time because they were totally different than the work gloves we’d envisioned – they were thin, elastic cotton gloves with the palms and fingertips dipped in rubber.  So on Day 1, we piled excitedly into the work van with our new friend, Marcantonio, sporting our work-fits: long underwear, running shorts, running shoes and rain pants below, running shirts, Smart Wool and fleece up top and our shiny new work gloves tying the whole ensemble together.  

Our car ride was mainly filled with awkward bilingual silence, punctuated by a few bursts of understanding over words like molto bello, and OK.  But as soon as we arrived at the first orchard, Marcantonio took a look at the newly muddy terrain, then at our Nike “work” shoes, and made a frustrated call to Tonio.  Through gestures and context, we realized that Tonio was turning back to grab a giant box of work boots for us ill-equipped volunteers. The shoes that Carl brought had a 3-toe sized hole. Soon, we had all our scarpe (shoes) in order and we ready to hit the trees — literally.

The first day of work was downright enjoyable. The sun was shining and it was pretty warm, even at 7:30 in the morning. We began in a small patch of olive trees on the edge of an abutting orchard. We unloaded the van with bundles of rolled mesh nets, 3 long air-powered rakes, a huge compressor on wheels and dozens of cassette (crates). We were about to learn how the olives are harvested, and now so are you.

HOW THE OLIVES ARE HARVESTED:

There are two jobs to effective olive harvesting: raker and net-mover. (These are technical terms, of course.) The guys were selected to be rakers with Tonio, and the girls to be net movers, with the blessing and curse of Tonio’s father as their third teammate.  Each job is exhausting in its own special way.

The rakers use pneumatic bacciadore (rakes) connected to long air hoses to move from tree to tree. At the end of a pole, there are two comb-like plastic pieces that clap together a few times a second to shake the olive off the branch without crushing it. The rakes are of varying length; so one person does the low, the middle or the high olives. The difficult part of the job is maneuvering around without stepping in the quickly forming piles of olives and having the stamina to keep a 10-pound rake horizontal or above your shoulders for an entire day. You attack branches from above, below or try to sandwich the branch in the rake, then watch it rain olives. Sometimes when a rake hits an olive just right, the olive flies some thirty feet in the air.  

But where does the olive go when it lands? 

Here’s Robin to tell you more. 

Well, if you want to harvest the olives, they need to land on nets instead of the ground.  And that’s where the net movers come in.  Our main job is to make sure that the rakers never run out of covered ground as they move from tree to tree.  We used about 15 nets or reiti, ranging from 5’x15’ to 25’x35’ in size.  Their sizes are directly proportional to their weight, awkwardness of carrying, and amount of cursing.  To begin each day, you smoothly lay all the nets out under and between the first trees to be tackled, overlapping them and wrapping a burlap sack around the base of each tree to avoid any space where olives can slip through.  It’s like a boring but stressful puzzle, figuring out the best way to cover the most ground, leaving no gaps and allowing enough coverage around the tall trees (see David’s comment about how high the olives can go).  The process is systematic, but the problem is that each olive harvester has their own system, and some systems can’t be explained in English.  

And then, before you have a moment to admire your handiwork, the rakers have blown through the first few trees and the “mover” part of the job description sets in, undoing your work and redoing it 50 yards away. For the few nets where there is only a handful of olives, you can move them as is, but for most there are so many olives that the net has to be dumped before it can be moved.  So you gather the olives into the middle of the net (not so much fun on the 25’x35’er), sort out the rami (twigs) from the olives, and pour your bounty into a happy yellow cassetta. Each cassetta holds 65lbs of olives, and sometimes we would fill two with olives from a single net.  

Depending on the yield of the trees, we would collect between 15 to 30 cassettas, in a day. Every day or two we would go to the press once the van was full or we’d run out of cassettas; each trip yielded literally a ton of olives. At the press, you dump your small cassettas into a bigger cassetta, where the press holds the olives for you until you’re ready to make oil. Once the olive is off the tree, it ideally should be pressed within about 48 hours.  Extra virgin olive oil is the first pressing of the olive.  After the pressing process, the waste product – all the pulp, skins and pits – get literally thrown out by the side of the building and gets taken for a second pressing for use in oil for lamps and other industrial purposes.  We got to take a walk through the press and check out every step.  One step we had expected was glaringly missing: the olives are never cleaned.  Aside from a heavy air blower getting rid of stray leaves, twigs and clumps of dirt, the olives aren’t rinsed or washed.  Maybe that’s what gives the oil that great earthy taste. But now…

BACK TO THE GRIND

The first day had felt like a field trip and we had fun moving nets, raking trees, and picking missed olives by hand. Day Two was work. 

All of us were tired from waking up a few hours earlier than usual and working much harder than usual. We spent the day finishing up our second orchard and wrapped up around 2pm. We carefully and methodically folded all the nets, wrapped all the air hoses and repacked the vans. And then headed straight to another orchard, unpacked everything we’d just packed up minutes before, and worked another 4 hours till the sun went down. We went home exhausted, but proud that we’d finished our third orchard in two days. What we hadn’t really realized was that Tonio had started us off on the training wheels orchards, and they grew exponentially in size from there.
 

By Day Three, we were starting to fall into the routine. We’d wake up with vague dread, shuffle out to our colazione (breakfast) of espresso, cookies, and cereal, and then trudge down to the chilly garage to suit up.  We’d politely jockey for which couple rode with which Creanza: Tonio for some good conversation, Marcantonio for Italian practice and decompression.  Then we’d unpack the vans in the morning fog, and get showered with freezing dew from the first few trees.  After working the morning away industriously, we’d actually feel our bodies getting slower and our moods getting worse as we’d check the sun and hope that it was as late as it felt. 

Then, glorious pranzo (lunch)!  Inverted cassettas doubled as a table and chairs, and after a hand wash from a water bottle, we’d dig into Grazia’s homecooked multi-course lunch.  Entrees like wild chicory and broccoli, artichoke risotto, eggplant parmegiana, bread soup, tomato and egg casserole, and spaghetti frittata, followed by regional cheeses, biscuits, and fruits.  All washed down with Creanza homemade wine.  We’d linger over our cold sugared espresso until the lingering turned to clear stalling, and then head back to our posts for the rest of the afternoon.  With a few exceptions, Tonio and his dad were excellent at timing our work to the sunset, and we’d begin packing up with just enough time to finish before nightfall.  

Packing up was a mixed bag. We were thrilled the day was almost done, but so angry about how we’d have end it: sorting and filling more crates of olives, folding cumbersome nets to specification, and finally assembling a train of people to carry the 65lb crates back to the van, which were usually farthest from us by the end of the day. Our crate trains were put to shame by Tonio, and more impressively, his 80 year old father and his slender office-professional brother, who could hoist a cassetta over their shoulder and walk the 100 meters to the van over and over. However, the feat of strength was a bit compromised by how they would disperse the weight by putting weight-bearing arm on their hip. (Giving the method kind’ve a cat-walk look.)

At night, we’d head back to apartment to wash an actual layer of dirt off ourselves and eat an abondante meal with true hunger, retelling the day’s hardships to each other. We realized how the end of a hard day actually feels. Our office work was tiring, but this was exhausting. When we’d close our eyes, even if just blinking for a second, we would see visions of olives on branches. Tenille dreamt that she was brushing her hair and olives fell out.  When we’d make our beds in the morning, we’d pull the sheets up as if we were laying nets on the orchard.  Our brains had turned to tapenade.

We carried on this way for the workweek. By day 5, we felt like we were quickly becoming pros at harvesting olives. When Tonio would disappear, sometimes on a phone call or to fix something that none of us knew was broken, we realized that the training wheels were officially off: The four of us volunteers were capable of single handedly harvesting olive orchards in Puglia. 

THE UNRAVELING

The toughest orchard was a triangular shaped plot on the side of a steep and muddy hill. By the road, the orchard was 30 or so trees wide and tapered to a single tree at the top. In one day, we’d nearly finished the whole thing, but had to quit as the sun went down with 4 trees left. Everyone was mad about having to come back the next morning to finish. We had to haul all the nets, rakes, compressors and crates up to the top of the hill for less than an hour’s work the next morning on the most physically exhausting of all the orchards. When we moved to the next orchard, we’d reached our breaking point.

Exhaustion overtook our sense of pride. David’s hands were bruised on the edges of his palms from the rake and his wrists and fingers felt arthritic in the mornings. Robin’s lower back had reached previously unknown levels of soreness.  As we would grow hungry toward lunchtime, we would hear dramatic speeches in our heads damning our host for working his free labor force too hard. David often found himself debating whether slavery was, in fact, still practiced in Puglia. On day 6 the family came to help with the harvest; their excited attitudes did little to raise our already jaded spirits. Carl and Tenille hadn’t heard that there were no weekends, so were even more upset than us by Day 7. We only got days off if the weather was too bad to work.

We were praying for rain. 

It worked. In the hours before sunrise of Day 8, we woke to sounds of rain pouring down the gutters of our apartment complex. It rained enough to get 4 days off from the harvest. We were finally able to see the area around Altamura that wasn’t covered in orchards. (More on that in our next post.) We were treated to delicious lunches in restaurants we would have never found on our own, and had insightful tours of the city from Tonio who was practically a local celebrity. We also became practical celebrities when Tonio arranged to have us go on air for an interview on a local talk radio station (we’re still unsure if anyone listens to the station). Our days off were a welcome break, but we were kept busy as Tonio whisked us from sight to sight until sunset every day. 

THE HOME STRETCH (for the harvest and for our readers!)

Once the ‘hiatus’ was over, we had a new challenge: mud. As we walked we’d develop a heavy high 
heel of caked on dirt, flinging it behind us and onto the nets when it got too big to stay attached. In some orchards it was clay mud that would stick your shoes to the net and pull it along with you after you had finished carefully laying it out.  In other orchards the mud was mixed with chunks of limestone that would flip out from behind your shoe and land in the center of the net amongst olives, making for an irritating treasure hunt during sorting.  But most of all, it was heavy and squishy, and one muddy day felt like two dry days.

A group photo early on our last day

Even with our new enemy, the second leg of the harvest was much more tolerable. We now knew what to expect, and our muscles were accustomed to the work. We also had the help of Lorenzo, an unemployed 20-year-old Altamuran hipster who was surprisingly even less prepared for harvest work than us. (We’re still not sure if having an extra man was the improvement, or just having someone worse at harvesting than us was the morale boost we needed.) Plus, we could see an end in sight: Tonio estimated maybe another 8 days, and we knew we’d done that before – and survived.  With our newfound focus toward the end of the harvest, we were reaching new levels of efficiency. By Day 10 of harvesting, Tonio announced that we had reached “professional.” And by the last day, he upgraded our status to “miraculous.”  The fact we finished on the last day just as the last sunlight was slipping under the horizon was indeed a miracle. We celebrated with a surprise group hug around Marcantonio (not the cuddliest of elderly Italians).

UP NEXT:

Our time in Puglia away from the Orchard. Best Eats, Best Sights, and Best Times (they weren’t during the harvest).