Number of mechanical operations in the coffee harvest

Abstract

Performing more than one operation of coffee harvester can increase fruit harvest efficiency by minimizing the amount of remaining plants and the need for manual transfer. This manual harvest makes often more expensive the production process and promote more damage to the plants in relation to mechanization. However, it should know how many operations it is necessary to completely harvest the fruits of the trees, in fields that have different production loads, especially the higher loads, since they are more difficult to be fully harvested. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess the number of harvester operations in two coffee plantations, for an efficient harvesting. Two situations were compared: crop with intermediate load (50.78 benefited coffee bags ha-1) and tillage with high load (121.54 benefited coffee bags ha-1) on the Cerrado Mineiro region, using one to six operations of a KTR harvester. It was used a randomized block design with four replications. The number of fallen coffee, remainned harvested and harvesting efficiency were evaluated. It was found that for the remainned amount of coffee plants, to dispense the manual harvest it is required three operations of coffee harvester at high loads and two at intermediate loads. Regardless of the coffee load, using three or more harvester operations, a larger amount of fruits was harvested, without differing in crop harvest efficiency with two operations.