great tastes. great stories.
Fares Fares, the uncle of Youssef Fares the owner producer of Zejd, welcomed a friend of ours who came to capture the harvest in 2021.
Fares is still actively involved in the harvest and looking after the land. His grandfather bought the land in the days when olive oil was made very differently. Horses once turned a stone mill to crush the olives. Whilst production methods have changed since then, they still follow agricultural practices his grandfather would have recognised.
Fares Fares
uncle of Youssef Fares
owner producer of Zejd.
photo by Nessim Stevenson
Harvest time in Lebanon depends on the weather and ripeness of the olives. A team of local workers spend around a month from early morning til late at night, hand picking the olives and helping with the processing. They are careful to avoid bruising the olives, since even a small tear in the olive skin can set off the oxidisation process which impairs the quality of the oil. Unlike intensive olive farming where tractors are used to shake trees which damage the shallow roots of the trees, the work has to be done by hand.
Seventy seven year old Mohammed, one of the harvesters, is immensely proud that he’s worked with olives all his life. During the olive season he and the other team members string nets up between trees to catch the olives and lay sheets on the ground to make collecting easier.
Rabih is another seasonal worker, who started working on olive harvests when he was 15 years old. He is an expert at judging when an olive is ripe from the slight changes in its skin texture.
More often than not, it is the women who are doing the more time consuming work. Theirs is the arduous job of sifting through the olives picking out twigs and leaves so that quality is not compromised. They’re the unsung heroes of the olive harvests.
To capture the beauty of the land where the olives grow, we asked a film maker in Beirut, Nessim Stevenson, to film the olive harvest. Nessim spent the day in Beino getting to know the team as they harvested.
The Akkar region, where Beino is situated, is an important farming area in Lebanon and relatively untouched. His short video records the harvest and those whose livelihoods depend on it.