Study of alternatives to improving the safety in organge harvest

Abstract

The citrus industry is one of the main agricultural activities in the country. Although this culture is quite technified, the harvesting is still done manually with the help of ladders and bags. Manual harvesting is an activity that causes great physical discomfort, low operating income and submit the employee to a high risk of accident. The objective of this work is to improve the safety conditions and comfort of manual pickers and, if possible, to increase their production. To discuss the feasibility of this study, a meeting kind “brainstorming” was done with technicians of the sector, when it was raised some ideas and proposed alternative solutions. Three harvesting systems were selected for testing: - aluminum ladder with basin and duct canvas and fixed bag at the base of the ladder, 2 - aluminum ladder with basin, PVC duct, wheels and fix bag at the base 3 ° - aluminum ladder and alternative bag, called “harvest cloth with flaps” placed on the ground under the tree canopy. The first two systems (stairs with ducts) in preliminary tests proved inadequate because of the difficulty of the pickers to keep the ladder upright. At the end, only the aluminum ladder with use of cloth flap was compared to conventional ladder. In the analysis of operational times, the aluminum ladder shown promise and the new bag model, despite the improvement in the comfort of picker, resulted in the decrease of individual production and increase in harvesting time.