Author
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Takeda, Fumiomi |
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Submitted to: Vegetable and Specialty Crop News
Publication Type: Trade Journal Publication Acceptance Date: 9/15/2018 Publication Date: 10/1/2018 Citation: Takeda, F. 2018. Applying new technologies to transform mechanical harvesting of blueberry for fresh market. Vegetable and Specialty Crop News. Available: http://vscnews.com/improving-mechanical-harvesting-of-fresh-market-blueberries/. Interpretive Summary: Technical Abstract: The growth of the blueberry industry in the past three decades has been remarkably robust. For the blueberry industry to remain competitive and sustainable, growers are seeking solutions to ever-increasing problems with labor shortage and increasingly high labor cost for harvesting blueberries by hand. More and more growers are now using over-the-row (OTR) mechanical harvesters to pick blueberries going for fresh market, but the quality of blueberries harvested by commercial OTR machines is low. In this article, the activities of the Specialty Crops Research Initiative (SCRI) funded project on blueberry harvest mechanization are highlighted. It discusses the development and testing of harvest technologies and practices that allow for machine harvest of fresh market blueberry with high fruit quality, food safety risks associated with conventional and new harvesting technologies, and use of sensor technologies to identify factors contributing to bruise damage, and also to detect and measure bruise damage in the blueberry non-destructively so that bruised and machine-damaged blueberries can be effectively sorted out on the packing line. |
