Estimating costs of a chestnut mechanical harvester
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abstract
Financial support by FEADER program PDR 2020 – Programa de Desenvolvimento Rural do Continente – Projeto
“Grupo Operacional ValorCast” - PDR2020-101-032034 – “Valorização da castanha e otimização da sua
comercialização”.
In some European chestnut producing regions, harvest is mostly manually. However, due to the difficulty to find
available labour, a significant number of producers are changing harvesting procedures, adopting mechanical systems.
There is not reliable information about costs associated to this harvesting system. This information can assume great importance for producers decision.
To contribute for the performance assessment of harvesting equipment based on a vacuum harvester, field trials to evaluate work rates has been carried out in Northeast of Portugal.
With the data collected it is possible to estimate associated costs and contribute for a better understanding of the
feasibility of this procedure.
To evaluate the equipment work rate, time for each elementary operation was measured.
Work rate is presented by the ratio worked area / time.
Costs are computed under international standards for agricultural machinery management.
In environmental conditions and agriculture systems in the geographical area were field trials took place, vacuum
harvesters can reduce harvesting time and associated costs. It can be an answer to the lack of labour required for manual harvesting.
Despite the need for further studies, this seems to be a good solution for lack of manpower problem. It is also
necessary to change some agricultural practices in the field to improve the harvesting machines performance, such as soil management.
