Why is the harvest time of coffee so long? Which method is better, manual picking or mechanical harvesting?

How is the coffee harvested?

Coffee is processed in different ways. From seeds to cups, there are countless decisions and different ways of doing things. Only through careful experiments and research can coffee realize its true potential.

Coffee picking is the first step for ripe cherries to enter our cup. There are two ways to use them.

Selective harvest is only hand-picked ripe coffee cherries. Only ripe cherries are picked, while immature cherries are left on the tree and need to be reassessed a few weeks later. Repeat the process until all feasible coffees are picked.

This is a very labor-intensive method that requires pickers to be placed and baskets hung around the waist. The baskets are then emptied into larger collection bags, and at the end of the day, the harvest is dispersed and all foreign debris and overripe fruit are removed. Then, finally, weigh the cherries and split the payment.

This harvesting method has some advantages and can help produce coffee of as high quality as possible. Since only ripe fruits are picked, the reduction in the percentage of immaturity in harvested coffee leads to higher prices for producers. After picking coffee by hand, you can plant trees on steep hillsides, which can be easily manipulated by humans, but the machines are not so convenient, so that other land can be used for farming more efficiently.

However, since manual picking requires a lot of work, farms need a lot of labor, and they are willing to work at the lowest wage. Not only that, rising wages mean that producers cannot afford to hire so many people. This approach is also painful because the increase in the urban population means that the availability of rural labour is declining.

So what's the choice?

Peeling and harvesting is a place where all coffee fruits are mechanically removed from the tree at one time. This leads to harvests at different levels of maturity, but much more intensive and expensive.

There are three kinds of peeling methods. The first is manual peeling. This process involves the picker putting the canvas on the ground, grabbing the branches of the tree and pulling it out, picking all the fruit and putting it on the canvas. Then collect the coffee in a bag and weigh it, where you pay by weight or volume.

The second is mechanical stripping. This is very similar to manual stripping, but the picker gets some mechanical help. Pickers use a tool called derricadeiras, a mechanical stripper similar to Freddie Krueger's hand. The tool has a metal finger that knocks coffee onto the waiting canvas.

The third way to peel coffee is to use a mechanical harvester. Machines that first appeared in the 1970s use rotating and vibrating mallets to beat fruit into harvesters. By adjusting the speed of rotation and vibration as well as the speed of the whole machine, they can minimize the yield of immature cherries. Another technique is to remove the lower mallet from the machine at the beginning of the harvest, because the top of the tree tends to mature prematurely, and then go back to harvest the bottom of the tree when the tree is ripe. This method does require flat terrain to accommodate the machine.

Skinning harvests require less FAR labor, which means much faster than selective skinning. However, due to the low degree of specialization of harvesting, it will produce varying degrees of maturity, if they are not separated, it will lead to uneven drying, resulting in a decline in product quality. Not only that, more post-harvest techniques are needed to assess size and maturity, including pulpers and optical separators. In the end, as a result of harvesting a lot of immature fruit, these fruits are wasted, thus reducing the quality and quantity of the final product, which usually means a reduction in profits for producers.

Each harvest method has its obvious advantages and disadvantages, and as part of the planting process, growers must decide on the budget, the overall coffee quality required, the location and topography of the land, and the availability of the labour force. You can't really think that one method is better than another, and the method does vary from farm to farm.