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November 2021: Harvest report

Greetings from Fat Gold!

Robin here, writing to you from the epilogue of our 2021 harvest. It felt like this:

A glamor shot of a cluster of dark, ripe olives on a branch

But also like this:

Mostly green olives gathered in a bin, waiting on a truck while a forklift loads more in the background

Then, like this: fresh oil in the sightglass, and doesn’t it LOOK like some kind of flowing, molten gold?

Shimmery green-gold olive oil flowing turbulently through a sight glass

Moments later, it felt like this:

Crystal clear olive oil in a small plastic cup, held by a grubby hand

The little slurp of oil you see there is part of the very first batch we produced this season; it’s the oil we’re sending to subscribers this month.

Finally, at the end of a long day, the harvest felt like this:

Three planets and a moon above a dark olive grove

That’s Jupiter in the upper left, Venus in the lower right. Saturn’s there, too: I could see it with my naked eye.


The harvest this year was bigger, faster-paced, and more focused than ever before. We saw a kind of Fat Gold Network take shape: the group of farmers and millers we’ve worked with before, who we know and trust and like. To this host of known accomplices, there’s been one new addition, a good one, whose tale we will tell in the zine we send with this month’s shipment to subscribers.

This year’s harvest HAD to be sharper, because Kathryn was working full-time in the mill for our great friends at ENZO Olive Oil Company. No problem; like a mafia don with a smuggled cell phone, she kept Bryan and me in near-constant motion, driving our trucks in tight formation, ferrying olives in batches of 2-6 tons. The San Joaquin Valley was cloaked this winter in a heavy fog, which, on the highway at 5 a.m., alternated between magical and terrifying. After the sun rose, it was beautiful: a green world caressed by long limbs of mist.

Out on the road, in the field, the work is straightforward. The real art of the harvest comes a step earlier, connecting the dots, matching groves to mills, the right tonnage, the right day. Could a harvest really just be a spiderweb?

Kathryn with her master plan

We bow to our spider queen!

Thanks, as always, for following along!

–Kathryn, Robin, and Bryan