Production Practices and Quality Assessment of Food Crops. Vol. 1

FRUIT AND VEGETABLES HARVESTING SYSTEMS
MARGARITA RUIZ-ALTISENT, JAIME ORTIZ-CAÑAVATE AND CONSTANTINO VALERO
Department Agricultural Engineering, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
E-mail: mruiz@iru.etsia.upm.es
1. INTRODUCTION
Fruits and vegetables have a high importance in world food production and human
nutrition and health. Mechanical harvest of fruits and vegetables shows special
problems like:
– products to be harvested are enormously variable regarding agronomic, physiological,
structural characteristics, size and shape, detachment, etc.;
– harvesting machines have to be very specialized and they are used a low number
of hours in a year;
– fruits and vegetables have been, and still are, harvested manually even in high
developed countries, so that labour problems usually appear when trying to
introduce mechanization with the aims of improving economy and quality;
– factors regarding: adequate varieties, planting systems and scheduling, soil and
irrigation management, materials handling, grading and sorting, processing, and
others, which in themselves need considerable know-how and technification,
impose strict conditions on the viability of mechanical harvest of any fruit or
vegetable species.
Most operations which are coincident with the ones used in other crop productions
like: soil tillage, fertilizing, seeding or planting, spraying, etc. are generally
solved using mechanical equipment, in most fruit and vegetable productions.
Operations involving: cleaning, handling and transportation, which can be performed
in fixed installations, are also generalized with the application of mechanization
and in some cases of automation equipment (Ortiz-Cañavate and Hernanz,
1989).
Mechanical harvesting of only those fruit and vegetable products destined to
processing can be considered generalized and economical in developed countries.
Products for fresh market can in many cases be harvested using mechanized aids,
which have attained very diverse level of sophistication for different species and
locations. And in later years, robotic harvesting is being developed aimed to solve
fresh fruits harvesting with the same quality as manual harvesting.
Manual harvesting of fruits and vegetables accounts for 30 to 60% of the
total production costs, with a high net share in the final price of the product.
Therefore, mechanization of harvest operations has a high potential for input
reduction.
This section deals mainly with the existing principles and functions which make
up the mechanical harvesting equipment for temperate fruits and open-air grown
vegetables.
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R. Dris and S. M. Jain (eds.), Production Practices and Quality Assessment of Food Crops,
Vol. 1, “Preharvest Practice”, pp. 261–285.
© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.