Techno-economic Efficiency of Trunk and Mechanical Harvest Aid Shakers for Harvesting Olive Fruits in Guilan Province, Iran

The main concern of an olive grower is primarily to achieve more income and profits. A harvesting method having higher efficiency and better fruit and oil quality, but a higher operation cost leads to a lower benefit. A study was carried out to evaluate the techno-economic performances of Trunk Shaker (TS) and Mechanical Harvest Aid (MHA) shaker for harvesting the yellow and Manzanilla olive cultivars in Guilan province, Iran. A factorial experiment based on randomized complete block design was used in four treatments at three replicates. The percentage of harvested fruit, fruit harvest rate (kg h-1), harvesting efficiency, leaf abscission, canned fruit acidity, and the percentage of bruised fruits, fruit tissue resistance were determined as the technical traits and benefit to cost ratio to evaluate the economic performance of experimental olive harvesting methods. The results showed that the TS with 60.6 had more harvesting percent of fruit than the MHA (24.1). Average harvesting time of a tree was recorded 10.7 minutes by TS that this was 8.2 minutes in MHA. The harvesting efficiency in TS method of Manzanilla variety was much more MHA method and yellow variety. The efficiency was 100.38 kg h-1 in TS that is more than in the method of MHA with 43.72 kg h-1. Fruits harvested with TS, with an average of 1.07 Newton, had a higher firmness of the fruits in compared to MHA method. TS method with 1270 dollar per day had more benefit compared to MHA method with a profit of $606.