FRUIT AND VEGETABLES HARVESTING SYSTEMS Lae DCU7lU 1. INTRODUCTION Fruits and vegetables have a high importance in world food production and human nutrition and health. Mechanical harvest of fruits and vegetables shows special problems like: — products to be harvested are enormously variable regarding agronomic, physio- logical, structural characteristics, size and shape, detachment, etc.; — harvesting machines have to be very specialized and they are used a low number of hours in a year; — fruits and vegetables have been, and still are, harvested manually even in high developed countries, so that labour problems usually appear when trying to introduce mechanization with the aims of improving economy and quality; — factors regarding: adequate varieties, planting systems and scheduling, soil and irrigation management, materials handling, grading and sorting, processing, and others, which in themselves need considerable know-how and technification, impose strict conditions on the viability of mechanical harvest of any fruit or vegetable species. Most operations which are coincident with the ones used in other crop produc- tions like: soil tillage, fertilizing, seeding or planting, spraying, etc. are generally solved using mechanical equipment, in most fruit and vegetable productions. Operations involving: cleaning, handling and transportation, which can be per- formed in fixed installations, are also generalized with the application of mecha- nization and in some cases of automation equipment (Ortiz~Cafiavate and Hernanz, 1989). Mechanical harvesting of only those fruit and vegetable products destined to processing can be considered generalized and economical in developed countries. Products for fresh market can in many cases be harvested using mechanized aids, which have attained very diverse level of sophistication for different species and locations. And in later years, robotic harvesting is being developed aimed to solve fresh fruits harvesting with the same quality as manual harvesting. Manual harvesting of fruits and vegetables accounts for 30 to 60% of the total production costs, with a high net share in the final price of the product. Therefore, mechanization of harvest operations has a high potential for input reduction. This section deals mainly with the existing principles and functions which make up the mechanical harvesting equipment for temperate fruits and open-air grown vegetables.