MECCANIZZAZIONE DELLA RACCOLTA DEI PICCOLI FRUTTI: ATTUALITÀ E PROSPETTIVE

Most of the Italian berry fruits are hand-picked and sold on fresh fruit market. Italian berry fruits growers cannot produce for the processing because of the reduction in available labour, increasing of labour regulations and resultant costs. They cannot compete with lower price processed berries from hand-picked or mechanical harvested crop imported from abroad. This work describe mechanical berry fruits harvesters ad training systems used for mechanical harvested berry crop in the best developed berry fruit producer countries. Daily and seasonal surface covered by a raspberry harvester machine in the Italian raspberry crops growing conditions, calculated using mechanical harvesting parameter found out in bibliography, are respectively between 2 and 3 per hectares and 17 and 25 per hectares. These values show that the little surfaces are the greatest obstacle for the mechanical berry harvesting in Italian familiar farms. Mechanical raspberry harvester price is about 75 millions Lire and its cost is estimated between 1,5 and 2,5 millions Lire per hectare, calculated without lost fruits and less quality costs. Increasing surfaces with varieties of berry fruits that gives best results in processing and applying mechanical harvesting using berries harvester owned by agricultural machine renting society or processing company interested in vertical integration are the required conditions to reduce costs and to produce for the growing market of processed berries fruits.