Olive harvesting equipment, this year we will use agritec equipment

All year I think about how I can make the olive harvest easier on us, it is a very hard working and tough task that can take over three weeks with us working long hours every day and as a couple Marthese and I harvest olives from over 900 producing olive trees.

This year there will be a big change, we are investing in olive harvesting tools from agritec, a local supplier from Manciano Grosseto and manufacturer of olive harvesting equipment.

What does this mean for us, how we worked previously

In the first year of olive harvesting we already had our tractor ‘Red’ and I thought the addition of a specialized olive harvesting compressor that created air to be used with pneumatic olive harvesting tools would be the way forward.

In the end I found a used unit complete with two poles and heads and this was purchased, the unit was almost new and worked well through the next two olive harvest seasons but although it was easy to use and maintain, it did mean that the tractor put another 60 hours on the clock, meaning a service in advance of what we expected normally.

This obviously is a cost, as well as the diesel used to run the tractor. For this reason I was always think of moving towards electrically powered olive harvesting tools, and in the end settled on li-ion harvesting tools from agritec.

The new olive harvesting tools, how do we choose?

When choosing our equipment it needed to meet certain specification and “nice to have’s” these involved;

• the speed of the machine when operating, which influences how many olive can be removed
• the width of the head which influences how much of the tree you can cover with each stroke
• the length of the pole and is it powered or manually adjusted
• the weight of the unit, as we need to work with the olive harvesting equipment all day, the lighter the unit, the better
• how long the unit would run on one battery charge, we don’t want to stop to charge a battery every 2 hours
• the ease of replacing any broken parts
• the customer support and parts availability from the manufacturer

In our next post we will be looking at the specifications of the agritec equipment and seeing which unit from their range of olive harvesting equipment is right for us.

If you want more information on agritec products, then you can view their full range of equipment on the agritec website