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Abstract: The harvesting process of the olive tree is mainly performed by manual means, because traditional olive orchards (the main planting typology) are formed of irregular, large-canopy trees that are very difficult to harvest mechanically. For that reason, the cost of harvesting is very high, and it threatens the future of these plantations whose conversion to other more modern layouts is not always possible due to several limitations. The introduction of a harvester may represent the technological change that is the key factor for improved competitiveness. The main purpose of this work was to develop a harvester based on canopy shaker technology for work on irregular, large trees in a circular path. The design of the harvester was based on a determination of tree geometry, together with tree training. Field tests were used to determine machine-tree interaction, and to evaluate the removal, catch frame and driven systems. The proposed innovation allowed the fully mechanical harvest of previously planted trees with a removal efficiency of over 84%, achieving an effective field capacity of 0.21 hm2/h. Although the results so far have been promising, further improvements are advisable in machine and tree adaptation.
Keywords: olive tree, olive fruit, canopy shaker, harvester, machinery design
DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20181103.3265
1 Introduction
Mechanical harvesting is one of the main activities that can be performed to reduce crop production costs or mitigate the dependency on labour[1]. In recent years, harvesting technologies for the mechanical fruit detachment process have been intensively studied, particularly for fruit trees such as oil olive trees whose production is destined for industrial transformation.
Initially, branch shakers and shaker combs facilitated fruit detachment by selecting the bearing branches without modifying the tree structure in crops that were traditionally manually harvested such as olive[2], apricot[3] or cherry trees[4]. Later, trunk shakers enabled detachment of the fruit from the whole tree after modifications had been made in tree structure, such as in olive[5] or almond trees[6]. A third development saw straddle harvesters used for integral harvesting in new, high-density olive orchards that had a different layout, pruned trees and a fully mechanised process, similar to that employed in vineyards[7].
In all of the above cases, mechanisation was carried out by adapting the orchard to the available harvesting technology, mainly in trees...