Cucumber picking machine must be… manual

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

Until now, despite the widespread mechanization in the harvesting of various vegetable crops, the ideal cucumber picking machine is still an unattainable dream of collective farms and farmers. What is the secret here?

There is no secret here. It is enough to pay attention to the biological feature of the cucumber, which is partially similar to the tomato. Both vegetable crops are not ripening at the same time, i.e. out of four or five cucumber fruits, only one can reach commercial maturity, the rest have yet to do so. The situation is complicated by the fact that, unlike tomatoes, cucumbers first reach commercial maturity and only then biological. Thus, on the one hand, the collection of cucumbers must be done every 2-3 days, and on the other hand, meet the deadlines: 10-15 days after the ovary. Then cucumbers are no longer suitable as fruits and vegetables.

The development of units for mechanical harvesting of cucumbers has been carried out for a long time in many countries, in particular in the USSR, the USA and Hungary. However, even inIn the case when prototypes were launched into mass production, they did not receive wide distribution and, in the end, they turned out to be unprofitable compared to low-productive manual labor. Especially in a market economy, where the impeccable presentation of vegetables plays a decisive role.

First of all, there can be no question of any safety of plants during mechanical assembly: any machine for picking cucumbers damages the whips, lifting them and separating the fruits, which also get "for nuts". This is superimposed by the inevitably low productivity of such a machine due to the design features. They have a strong effect on the yield in the direction of its decline and wide aisles, convenient for the unit, but wasting the usable area. At the same time, a high culture of agriculture should reign on cucumber plantations, otherwise the machine will fail earlier than expected due to the constant clogging of fruit separators, which are very sensitive to weed infestation. Of course, not a single cucumber picking machine is able to selectively harvest marketable fruits, leaving the rest to ripen. For now, alas. But you can make it much more productive, and using the same technique.

Five years ago, on the Internet, the news about the use of a tractor trailer in Belarus for harvesting cucumbers, more reminiscent of an airplane of the early 20th century, was accompanied by a flurry of maliciouscomments. Like, look what heights the Belarusian agricultural engineering has reached!

I think the skeptics would have calmed down if they were given two baskets of cucumbers for comparison: one after picking by car, the other - by people on the "airplane". In addition, the information that the harvesting of cucumbers in Estonia and Austria is carried out using exactly the same units, for some reason, did not cause bilious ridicule.

And the benefits are obvious. At a tractor speed of about 1 km / h, ten workers manage to collect only marketable fruits. This does not damage the plants. The aisles are thick. The fruiting period and labor productivity increase. And if such a "semi-manual" picking machine turns out to be more productive and more perfect than all the marvels of technology created before it, why not use it?