DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF MECHANICAL AID TOOLS FOR MANGO FRUITS HARVESTING

Abstract

The main objective of the present study is to design and fabricate simple, low cost and portable mechanical harvesting aid of mango fruits for fresh marketing and exporting that assure having fair fruit quality with minimal twig height, and maximizing manual labor productivity in order to minimize the cost of manual picking. Therefore, four designed prototypes of mechanical harvesting aid tools namely mechanical disk cutter, electrical disk cutter, electrical scissors and cutting edge hook were designed and locally fabricated at some private workshops. The harvesting tools under study were evaluated and tested for harvesting Zebda and Hindi mango fruit varieties (mangifera indicia L.) using three different picking labors for each harvesting tool. The obtained results allow us to drawn the following conclusions:  The labor productivity increased by about 430.8, 240.1, 229.4 and 50.7 % for harvesting Zebda mango fruits and about 401.9, 215.2, 190.1 and 55.5% during harvesting Hindi mango fruits by using the mechanical disk cutter, electrical scissors, electrical disk cutter and cutting edge hook instead of using traditional stalk hook, respectively.  The lowest injured fruit percentage (3-4 and 3-4%) were obtained by using electrical scissors followed by electrical disk cutter (3-4 and 4-5%), then mechanical disk cutter (5-6 and 4-5%) for harvesting Zebda and Hindi mango fruits varieties, respectively. However, the highest values of validity period were 6-7 days and 8-9 days for harvesting Zebda and Hindi mango fruits varieties, respectively by using any of mechanical disk cutter, electrical scissors and electrical disk cutter.