Olive grove. Crushing of pruning cuttings

As we commented in one of our post of last month, one of the tasks that we carried out in the olive grove over these last months has been the pruning, both on young olive trees and on those we have in full production. These pruning tasks on the olive trees in production are usually done every year, although one year we practice an aggressive pruning and the following year a much lighter pruning. This year we have not made a very aggressive pruning and therefore we have not gathered excessive amount of pruning cuttings. On the young olive trees we prune every year and the objective is very different, since its aim is to form the tree without removing too many leaves because you can't decompensate the relation leaf-root. On large olive trees, when pruning is done, we think it is best to cut with a chainsaw, so imagine the size of pruning cuttings that are usually generated.

In December we bought a second-hand iD-David crushing machine. The truth is that we had been looking for a crushing machine for months and we quite liked this one (iD-David is a very specialized Spanish company in machinery for woody crops). We bought it in Talleres Marsemar (Villarrobledo - Albacete) and we have used it a lot (both for crushing olive and almond tree pruning cuttings). We had a very good feeling when we worked with it. The crushing machine is the iD-David TD-SO and it requires a tractor of at least 120 HP as it needs power when starting... we use it with our Agrotron M600 (130 HP) and the tractor works really fine at 1,700 r.p.m. of engine and 490 r.p.m. of PTO...  the crushing machine suffers a lot when many wood cuttings come in, especially wood of almond.

The aim of crushing the branches is to be able to incorporate these pruning remains into the soil because the pieces of wood end up decomposing and being incorporated into the soil as organic matter. We think this could be a very good choice for the olive grove and almond trees. Moreover, in Andalusia, the crushing of branches has been done for many years and the results are very positive.

Versión en español.