The harvest of olives in the old days.

Nederlands talige teksten

Nowadays one uses electric motors, plastic netting, irrigation and fertilization. 60 years ago this was a whole different story when we are talking about the cultivation and harvest of olives.

Imagine a wooden stick that was used to beat the olives off the tree and that the olives were hand-picked off the ground one by one.

The olives were thrown up in the air, hoping that the wind would separate the leaves from the olives.

Also in the factories things did not happen as rapid as they do today. The donkey pulled the millstone in circles and this took time. It often happened that the quality of the olives dropped, because the bags full of olives had been laying around waiting too long.

They also did not have a nice 4×4 Suzuki, but simply the donkey. Therefore, transport was also a lot slower.

Adding everything up, we owe the previous generations of olive pickers a lot of praise and respect, knowing that the current generation is complaining about the hard work!