Effects of Olive Harvesting Methods on Oil Quality

Olives are traditionally hand harvested, a process that is not only tedious and laborious, but represents the major proportion of the costs of production. As it is known, harvesting method has important effect on the quality of olive especially produced for table consumption. of this research is to compare effect of harvesting methods on amount of oleic acid (%) and peroxide value (meqO2/kg) which has importance for oil quality. Two different olive varieties whole olives and de-stone olives were used. Harvesting methods were harvesting by hand and harvesting by machine to collect on a platform. Amount of the oleic acid (%) and peroxide value (meqO2/kg) were measured by using titration method. According to the statistical analyzes results, differences between measured results were important (P ≤ 0,05).