You are here: SARDI Home  / Pests & Diseases  / Horticulture  / Horticultural Crops  / Apricots  / Harvesting: Picking Methods

Print

In the past, fruit for drying has been harvested individually by hand. Ladders are needed for fruit higher than a picker's reach, slowing picking and adding expense to an already expensive operation. With increasing pressure on the profitability of drying tree fruit, harvest mechanisation and aids have become more widely adopted. 

Hand picking

Management of a picking team takes some skill and organising.

Good fruit is easily ruined by rough picking. Check the operations and output of your picking team often, especially at the start of the season, to ensure the right maturity fruit is being picked and it is not being handled roughly. Rough handling bruises and softens the fruit making it difficult to cut

Ensure pickers know exactly what maturity fruit you expect to be harvested. Make sure the pickers are aware of differences in appearance of the fruit with position on the tree and that they know the difference between orange colouration from sunburn and the yellow-orange pigmentation of ripe fruit. Fruit exposed to the sun can be orange, yet hard, immature and unsuitable for drying.

By using tickets for each picker which are placed in the buckets they pick, output of each worker can be monitored. Pickers not doing their job correctly can be quickly identified and measures taken to change their ways. This or similar methods are necessary where several pickers are employed without personal supervision.

Tips for pickers

1. Pick each tree completely (all fruit of acceptable maturity) before starting the next one, and always start picking from the top.
2. Minimise the distance you carry full bags or picking containers to empty.
3. Minimise the number of moves around the tree—choose spaces between limbs to get the ladder well into the tree.
4. Start picking from top of the ladder while the bag is empty and light, move down the ladder as the bag fills.
5. Empty fruit quickly, but carefully to avoid bruising.
6. Pick with both hands; two hands are twice as fast as one.
7. Learn the picking method for the particular fruit and the grower's requirement. Pickers should be encouraged to ask if unsure.
8. Keep moving. A consistent picking rate is best overall, pace yourself.

Specially designed stonefruit picking bags are a worthwhile investment. They are supported in front of the picker by a shoulder strap, allowing fast picking with both hands, protect the fruit from damage and are easily emptied into transport containers.

Picking containers should be cleaned at least once a day, but more often if possible.

Containers and transport

Picking containers should have smooth sides and be easy to tip. Specially made plastic or fibreglass buckets with rigid non-crush sides are readily available. Plastic grape-picking buckets are quite suitable provided they are kept clean and not overfilled. Beware of flexible containers which have a tendency to crush fruit.

Dip tins frequently used to carry stonefruit are not ideal for safe handling due to their perforated nature, and their ability to collect dirt when placed on the ground is also a big failing. To a degree this can be overcome by lining the bottom with paper. Paper linings must be changed regularly. An advantage of the perforations in dip tins is the extra ventilation. This enables better storage under ambient conditions and faster cooling in a coldstore.

Place fruit no more than four or five layers deep in the transport containers. Deeper packing than this means fruit in the bottom layers will inevitably be bruised or crushed. Ideally, the fruit should be only two or three layers deep.

Be careful stacking containers of fruit for transport and in the cutting shed. Careless stacking or stacking overfilled containers crushes the fruit, wasting fruit and reducing profits.

Cart fruit to the cutting shed in a sprung vehicle if possible and at a moderate speed to avoid jolting that will damage the fruit.

Remember, fruit for drying is ripe, so it is easily squashed and bruised. Squashing can turn what would have been high-quality dried fruit into slabs. Bruising has little if any visible effect on dried fruit quality as it leaves the grower, but its effect on the product's storage life is not fully understood, so keep bruising to a minimum.

On larger blocks try to have at least two trailers for transporting fresh fruit. This prevents some of the double handling associated with unloading and stacking fruit containers at the cutting shed.

Mechanical aids

Power ladders can increase pickers' output several-fold. They are used to harvest fruit that cannot be reached from ground level, which on many blocks is much of the crop. Several types are commercially available (for example, Hydra-plat and Afron).

They eliminate the need for pickers to climb ladders and carry the fruit load on their shoulders. As the workload is eased and both hands are free when not manoeuvring the platform, pickers can be more accurate and efficient. Usually fruit can be picked cleaner with less physical damage (bruising).

Power ladders allow the picker to continually move to maintain fruit at the most comfortable position for picking. A safety frame surrounds the picker minimising the chance of a fall and allowing the picker to concentrate on picking.

These machines are expensive ($8 000 to $10 000) but more versatile than other mechanical harvest aids. They can be used in the harvest of most types of tree fruit that require hand-picking, and are also useful aids when pruning. They have a variety of other uses around the fruit block.

Mechanical harvesting

Mechanical harvesters developed overseas are not suitable for harvesting stonefruit for drying. The typical Californian machinery is complex, expensive and suited only to larger holdings than those in the South Australian dried fruits industry. Mechanical harvesters cannot harvest selectively, leading to heavy losses of overripe and green fruit.

Platform harvest aids or catching trailers for harvesting stone fruit for drying have been developed by grower ingenuity with refinement by the University of South Australia.

The system consists of a long sloping padded platform mounted on a trailer. The platform catches the fruit and runs it into bins or boxes carried underneath. Typically there are two catching surfaces, one large and one small, forming a valley.

Operation

The trailer is drawn up alongside the tree with its lower side (the smaller platform) close to the trunk. The operators stand on the larger platform and shake the branches individually with a hooked metal rod or tap them gently with rubber mallets to shake the ripe fruit on to the padded platforms. The fruit rolls down the slope into shallow trays held beneath the platforms.

There is an art to shaking the limbs—shaking too energetically or too long removes green fruit. If the trailer swivels the front and rear in turn can be slewed around the tree to harvest those parts that would otherwise be inaccessible from the traffic lane. This is usually done by a hydraulic ram mounted on the drawbar of the trailer. Some machines have a catwalk between the tractor and the trailer to enable the driver to more easily move back and forth between the two. These catching trailers can be successfully operated by one person.

Limitations

With proper and sensible use of the machines there is no noticeable drop in dried fruit quality: proper and sensible use means controlled shaking of limbs, suitable tree shape and suitable varieties. Story, Hunter, Trevatt and any other evenly-ripening varieties can usually be harvested successfully with a trailer catcher. Moorpark is not well suited because of the way individual fruit ripens—Moorpark fruit is soft on the tip when cutting ripe, and is easily damaged.

Some growers' fruit has a higher fibre content that allows it to be mechanically harvested without damage.

The widely adopted vase-shaped trees are suited to this harvesting system. The main requirement is for the dislodged fruit to fall free of the tree, that is, without passing through any lower branches that would cause damage to the fruit. Most training systems meeting this criteria will allow successful harvesting with a trailer catcher.

The surest way to decide whether your fruit can be harvested with a catching trailer is to borrow a unit and try it under your conditions.

Advantages

Reduced labour cost is the principle advantage of using trailer catchers. Offset against this saving is the capital cost of the equipment. Time required to recoup this capital cost depends on the tonnage of dried fruit produced. Calculated pay-back times for the mechanical harvest aid developed by the University of South Australia are shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Pay-back times for trailer catcher apricot harvesting system

Associated with the reduced labour cost is a reduction in the number of pickers required to be employed. Many producers consider this a significant advantage. Fewer pickers means fewer problems, less stress and an overall reduction in the management burden. With fewer pickers, the quality of the fruit coming into the cutting shed can be more easily monitored and controlled.