|
Harvest management makes or breaks the season. It is your last chance to influence the final outcome of your crop. It is also a pressure time on the orchard, because of the huge amount of labour required to pick the crop. Furthermore, a large proportion of this labour has never harvested fruit before. This means that organization and a good staff training programme is absolutely critical to a successful harvest.
Picker Training
Good picker training will lift picker performance to a competent level quickly, minimise harvesting defects and create a win/win situation for both orchardist and fruit picker.
Picker training needs to include the following:
- Techniques to identify which fruit are to be picked (note in selective colour picking check eyesight for colour blindness).
- Limbering up exercises to overcome neck and back pain.
- Ladder use including placement and picking order within the tree.
- The bruise test.
- Picking technique to remove fruit from the spur in the right way.
- Placement in the picking bag to minimize bruise risk.
- Emptying the picking bag into the bin.
New pickers in the first couple of days may struggle to achieve 1.5 to 2 bins per day, however if they have reasonable aptitude for the job and are given the correct training, will quickly lift their picking rate up to four to six bins per day, provided the fruit is there to be picked.
The paperwork involved in setting up new pickers is an expensive overhead, so minimizing staff turnover through training them properly so that they can achieve good picking rates and therefore good wages must be a good investment.
Organisation
Pickers are there to pick fruit. They are not being paid for waiting or walking.
Prior to the pickers arriving, the bins need to be ready in the blocks to be picked. Ladders and picking bags should be there too. Bin labels need to be ready, giving the essential details such as picker, block, variety and date.
Experienced, high performance pickers, who incidentally can pick as much as 15 to 20 bins per day under good conditions, claim that the most efficient modus operandi is to have one picker and his own bin per row. This picker will pick both sides of the row, working systematically down the row from side to side.
Bin placement is critical to performance. Bins should be no further than about five trees away from the picker. First bin placement should be five trees in from the end of the row, then as the picker moves down the row, shifted at 10 tree intervals. The picker picks five trees either side of the bin at each bin placement. An alert tractor driver with good communication through hand signals with the pickers is responsible for bin shifting as required by the pickers.
Ladder size affects the picking rate. Experience shows that a 9 rung ladder is about the largest that can be easily handled by the average picker. With tall trees, the tops above that reached with a nine rung ladder should be picked with the aid of a mechanical orchard platform such as a Hydraladder.
Incidentally, in many orchards, fruit in the upper tree often lags behind the lower tree fruit in regard to maturity, so it is not necessary for the early skim picks to include the treetop fruit.
Pickers should be trained to always go to the top of the ladder when their picking bag is empty, and work down the ladder. That way they don't have to carry the heavy fruit load up the ladder. Once they have picked down the ladder, the bag can be topped up from ground level picking, clearing lower level fruit ahead of the next ladder placement to reduce the risk of fruit damage on ladder repositioning.
Quality Management
Packing sheds tend to charge on the basis of fruit entering the packing line. Cost per export carton then is directly related to percentage packout, so it is good business sense to make sure that potential packout for the harvested fruit to be as high as possible. We estimate that a 10% increase in packout is worth an extra $30 per bin in fruit value. There is good incentive then to make sure the pickers get it right.
Regular quality auditing of picker performance is essential so that reject fruit due to picker faults is minimized.
Picker faults include low colour, small fruit and handling damage such as bruising, stem punctures and cuts.
Each picker needs to have a very clear instruction of the specification of the fruit to be picked in regard to size and colour. For size, supplying the appropriate minimum fruit size ring is a big help. For other parameters such as colour and maturity, supplying each picker with specimen fruit samples showing the requirement is a good technique. Incidentally, a small length of wood with nails driven into it to hold the fruit being used to define the harvest parameters is a good technique.
Picker incentives based on set levels of picker defect in the harvested bin have been successfully used by some fruit growers.
Early in the picking, each picker needs to be shown how the quality of the fruit is comparing with the required standard. Some defects such as bruising are not immediately obvious to pickers. Holding a bin overnight allows the bruising to come out, or if you want to fast-track the demonstration, holding a sample of their fruit in a plastic bag for several hours will show them a clear picture of the bruising problem.
By the way, keep Stirling Moss off the tractor and the forklift. Rough handling of bins between the picker and the packing line has been known to damage a lot of fruit.
| 
