Quevedo Organic Olive Oil – 75cl

Some years ago my sister came home and said do my father: “Hey dad, why don’t we convert the olive grove into organic production?”. My dad looked at her and replied with another question: why should we do that?”. And Claudia said something like this: “if we stop using chemicals to grow  the olives it won’t take us too much work, and I’m sure a lot of people would appreciate it. Moreover, more and more people are looking for organic grown food. In the end all of us want a more sustainable and less manipulated environment.”

And this is when all started, back in 2006. The olives trees are located in Valongo dos Azeites, which in English means “Long Valley of the Olive Oil” – which better name could the village have?!?  Valongo dos Azeites is located 14km south from S. João da Pesqueira, where we live. This is the place where our ancestors were based, several decades ago. Few hundred meters from the olive trees, we still have the house where our great-grand parents grew up. Valongo dos Azeites is a small village, with 227 inhabitants (2011), which embodies the word olive oil in its name. I’m sure this is not random, but actually because the village has extraordinary conditions to produce golden colored with amazing taste olive oil.

In total we have 25 hectares of olive trees and most of them are over 50 years old. As there was some land with no crops planted, in the last years my father decided to plant some more young olive trees. In total we have now over 4.000 olive trees, producing around 5.000 liters of olive oil.

We are very happy with the organic project. It is true that organic production consumes more time and resources as if cultivated in a conventional way, but in the end we maintain a diversity of weeds, insects and small animals that if we used herbicides would not survive.

Here is a post I made some years ago in case you want to know more about the harvest of the organic olives. This video shows you the harvesting machine.

Let us know if you feel as excited as we do about organic olive oil and share with us what you know about the second most important culture of the Douro valley in Portugal.

Oscar

The olives in the photo were waiting to be harvested. Until early last decade, we used sticks to bet on the branches and make the olives fall. But afterwards we adopted a vibrating machine to collect the olives. Check this video out about olive harvest with vibrating machine if you don’t know what I am talking about.

Oscar

The end of the Christmas season used to mark the best time to harvest our olives. And this year was not an exception. Beside the 250 acres of vines, Quevedo farms 50 acres of organic olive trees. Since 2003 we are growing our olives free of any chemical and farming in an integrated organic process. We have around 2,000 trees with 70 to 150 years old and around 2,500 between 2 and 10 years old.

Thus, during these weeks we have left the pruning shears at home and we have been dedicated to olive harvesting. Traditionally we used to use long sticks with which harvesters manually shaken the boughs and made the olive fall over a device called the oli-net, wrapped around the trunk of the tree and opened to form an umbrella-like catcher. This year we decided to introduce a new technology to harvest the olives. We are using a vibration harvester, which shakes the boughs, dislodging the olive fruit in few seconds. It definitively creates some vibration in the trunk but seems not to affect the heath of the olive tree. We have studied the effects of this harvester and we concluded no major damage was caused to the tree on the weeks and months after the harvest. The video helps to explain how this works.

To make a liter of olive oil, this year, we need around 6.5 kilograms of olive fruit. We expect to make around 4.000 liters of organic olive oil this year, slightly higher than last year. The younger olive trees produce more and more each year and the older ones keep their low yield and concentrated fruit.

Take a look at the video. What you think about this process?

Oscar Quevedo