**7. Harvesting**

In olive grove management, the harvest is the other most expensive practice, together with pruning. Harvesting systems, can be considered rational only when they can reconcile the operation costs with the necessity to pick up the maximum yield in respect of the product quality. In the past, the availability of low cost manpower with a manual harvest allowed the satisfaction of these two demands, but the low availability and increase of the cost of labor, have made such operations excessively onerous, and applicable only to table olives.

Manual harvest can be improved using hand-held pneumatic combs to detach the olives from the plant that assuage the work, and give maximum flexibility in terms of harvesting time, and increase the operators productivity, but it is time-consuming and costly.

Mechanical harvesting is executed with shaker, also equipped with a reverse umbrella as an olive interceptor, that has considerable economic advantages compared with traditional manual picking procedures(Tombesi & Tombesi, 2007). In this way a great reduction in labour costs, harvesting timeliness and good performance, is achieved. Nevertheless it is difficult to apply in the majority of traditional olive groves due to the presence of malformed, voluminous plants, or those of an unsuitable cultivar.

In the new intensive olive groves, with trees optimized for cultivar and structure, mechanical harvest is instead applicable with positive results, usually in a step, getting up to 80-90% of yield (Hartmann & Reed, 1975; Ferguson et al., 1999; Giametta & Pipitone, 2004; Toscano & Casacchia, 2006). In these orchards with well pruned trees it is possible to harvest up to 50 trees/hour with a suitable shaker and collecting system (Lavee, 2010).

Using shakers, the more efficient harvesting yard is constituted by 5 or 7 operators, of which one operates the shaker, and the others the nets and the moving of olives, reaching a productivity up to 0,4 tons/man by hour (Briccoli et al., 2006; Tombesi, 2006; Toscano, 2007).

In super intensive olive orchard, or intensive olive orchard with trees structured in a productive wall, continuous harvesters , derived from grape pickers that work on both walls of a row (Bellomo et al., 2003; Arrivo et al., 2006) can be used. Wall pickers, that work on a single side of tree walls, also reach a working productivity up to 1 hectare by hour, with yield percentages similar to the shakers (Toscano, 2010b).
