Resumen

OLIVEROS TASCON, Carlos Eugenio; RAMIREZ GOMEZ, Cesar Augusto; ACOSTA ACOSTA, Ricardo  y  ALVAREZ MEJIA, Fernando. PORTABLE DEVICE TO ASSIST MANUAL HARVESTING OF COFFEE. Rev. Fac. Nac. Agron. Medellín [online]. 2005, vol.58, n.2, pp.3003-3014. ISSN 0304-2847.

A battery-operated low-weight portable device was developed to assist manual harvesting of coffee. The device, driven by an 84,7 W DC motor, consisted of a 0,85 kg actuator carried in the operator's hand and an 8 kg back-mounted frame to carry the batteries. Two rotating beaters made of Teflon, turning at 1.100 rpm, detach the fruits. With the new device it is possible to obtain massive detachment in clusters with high concentrations of mature fruits, avoiding the "fruit grabbing" which demands 40 % of the time needed in a manual harvesting cycle. The inertia of the motor and the mechanism is enough to detach up to 4 fruits after turning the device off.  The device, called IMFRA 3DC (stands for the spanish words "IMpactador de FRutos" - fruit beater artifact), was evaluated in Timbío ( Cauca, Colombia ), in the main harvesting season of 2004. The evaluation was conducted in a plantation with 2-year old coffee trees of the Red Colombia variety. The trees were planted in a 1,5 m x 1,0 m pattern, in flat terrain, and each tree had two stems. The average mature fruit charge and concentration were 1,43 kg and 80,7 %, respectively. With the device, a net yield of 33,7 kg/h per operator was obtained, almost three times greater than that observed in traditional hand picking. The harvesting quality improved conspicuously when the operators were more familiar with the apparatus; the first day they harvested 10,3 % of immature fruits and the fourth day they harvested just 4,3 %. The effectiveness was close to 80 %, which is acceptable when an additional harvesting pass is required. The results obtained indicate that the IMFRA 3DC is a promissing tool to assist in manual harvesting in high-density coffee plantations and to reduce production costs.

Palabras clave : Coffee harvesting; coffee; portable device; impact.

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