Meet Optimus — a machine primed to transform olive harvesting

The olive harvesters at Cobram Estate are working around the clock at Boort and Boundary Bend to usher in this one year’s sever.

Daily half a billion olives are picked.

For the previous 15 years a machine called Colossus has been getting the job performed, but a brand unusual harvester called Optimus has joined the group, and it’s tipped to be sooner and more efficient.

Both machines feature in a similar method, straddling the olive tree, old to the fingers on their rotating deciding on heads comb the olives off the branches.

Cobram Estate’s joint chief executive Leandro Ravetti says Optimus has six deciding on heads when when in contrast with Colossus’s two.

“That affords you more flexibility but at the comparable time, more intensity in the movement, so that lets you trudge sooner,” he acknowledged.

There are two Optimus harvesters at Boort this season, but Mr Ravetti thinks that number will amplify in the impending years, as 40 per cent of the firm’s trees are soundless to attain maturity.

“We would favor unusual harvesters to deal with them, but additionally our Colossus is an growing old neighborhood of machines and we’re taking a look for at phasing them out and as they want substitute,” Mr Ravetti acknowledged.

“As adversarial to buying a brand unusual Colossus, we’ll potentially be taking a look for at buying more unusual Optimus and gradually making the total process loads more efficient.”

Mr Ravetti says the introduction of the Optimus harvester, designed in Argentina, would possibly possibly well even soundless mean that the firm’s want for seasonal workers will remain true, even as more trees attain maturity.

Roughly half of Cobram Estate’s olives are grown at Boundary Bend and Mr Ravetti says the unusual machines will sooner or later create their choice to the groves extra north.

“Boort has the ideal quantity of youthful trees, so naturally the enhance of harvest used to be going to happen here,” he acknowledged.

“So with any luck by the point that the full machines at Boort are Optimus, the machine goes to be essentially properly designed and very legitimate.

“That would possibly possibly well be the time to originate replacing the machines at Boundary Bend.”