Nowadays, most agricultural fields are filled with machines by the end of the summer season. Even though it is a lot of hard work, farmers look forward to this time when they concentrate on tomato harvesting.
The Harvest Season
During the harvest, tomatoes have to be processed quickly and farmers also need to preserve the quality of these tomatoes. So, harvesting speed is very essential. Mechanical harvesting of products like tomatoes is the natural solution. With a tomato harvester machine, the entire process of tomato harvesting becomes easy and safe.
What is a tomato harvester?
A tomato harvester is a machine used for harvesting tomatoes. It provides different functions that include cutting, shaking, quality sorting, and loading of tomatoes. A harvesting machine works on a hydraulic system. Machine harvesting is most popular worldwide. According to research, in the state of California, United States, the tomato harvest processing is done entirely using mechanical resources.
Why do you need mechanical harvesting?
Tomatoes were considered as the union crops till the late 70s decade. Later, with the introduction of hydraulic machines to facilitate the growth and production of hybrid varieties, machines took over the traditional ways. Due to the poor availability of manual labor in several parts of the United States, machine harvesting became a necessity to avoid illegal hiring of labor or even acquiring forced labor.
Many tomato companies started investing in mechanical harvesters for their agricultural lands and crops. For small varieties such as delicate datterinos and cherry tomatoes, new harvesting techniques were introduced.
Harvesting machines reduce post-harvest losses in a big way. They also help cut down the harvest time during busy cropping seasons, thus offering higher yields.
Differences between machine and manual harvesting
- Quality – Mechanical harvesting retains the quality of the harvested crops or products. On the other side, manual harvesting involves the shaking of plants inside bins or on the ground, it is a slow method with less yield.
- Cost-Effective – The cost of tomatoes harvested through mechanical processes is reasonable. However, the cost of tomatoes that have been manually harvested doubles its cost.
- Safety – Mechanical harvesting is safer for people involved as you need not employ unskilled laborers and pickers. Those working with mechanical harvesting are offered good work conditions and long labor contracts. Traditional harvesting methods do not provide safety, comfort, or security of work contracts to laborers.
- Ethical Values – Farmers help in contributing to the ethical code of transparency and high standards while they run the production chain through mechanical harvesting. Unlike in the case of manual harvesting, there is no danger of breaching ethical principles for crop harvesting.
- Speedy Harvest – Mechanical harvesting naturally speeds up the processing without affecting the fresh quality of the harvest. Traditional or manual harvesting cannot guarantee a good quality or speedy harvest.
Finding a tomato harvester for sale at affordable prices can be easy if you make an online search. Digital platform Tomatobil has aided thousands of farmers to find conducive social network systems to prosper in their farming businesses. Tomatobil does its bit by uniting agricultural farmers and producers with agro suppliers for deriving effective and timely harvest solutions.
