Cretan farmers and cooperatives have started using GPS chip technology in the shape of olives that are hung on trees to deal with the rising theft of olives during the current harvest season, ANA reports.
Vice-president of the Association of Farming Cooperatives of Iraklio Myros Hiletzakis told Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA-MPA) that the method was used successfully in Spain in 2019, and farmers on Crete tested it successfully before deciding to order it.
“The Spaniards found this solution in 2019, a year their production reached 2 million tons,” Hiletzakis notes. “The olive oil became at the time the focus of conmen who either stole into orchards at night and beat olive-laden trees with sticks, or – worse – they cut down large branches full of olives, transferring them to storage spaces and harvesting the olives there, with repercussions on the production capability of the trees.”
The Association had purchased four GPS chip ‘olives’ and tried them successfully, he said. The gadget “is connected to a cellphone through an application, and when the ‘olive’ is removed from the tree, in three or four meters away a message is sent, notifying the owner that it has been removed,” Hiletzakis explains. “We are working on a proposal with a company for an app that will track the entire path, the entire process of the GPS: from where it was removed and at what time, what its path was, and where it ended up.” The chip is waterproof, and can be placed even inside olive oil containers, he added.
“We must protect the olive oil in any way possible. The incidents of theft have increased following the economic crisis, especially now that olive oil has become as dear as gold, due to pricing. Producers on Crete have been known to stay awake through the night during large-crop years, to prevent theft. Let me remind you that at this time, 100 kilos of oil cost 1,000 euros,” Hiletzakis noted.
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