Evaluation of Mechanical Beaters in Coffee Harvesting

Two portable devices were evaluated for coffee harvesting. The Italian-made MAIBO beater (harvest tool), used for coffee harvesting in Brazil, and the beater designed by Cenicafé (CENICAFE-I), which removes fruits by applying pressure to the clusters that have a higher content of ripe fruits. The research was conducted in two stages. In the first, the two beaters were compared using 60 experimental units of seven trees each. The CENICAFE-I beater presented the better quality in the harvested coffee and used an equal amount of time per tree. In the second stage, the performance of the CENICAFE-I beater was compared with the traditional manual method, using an commutative experimental design with 50 plots (replicates) of 14 trees each; randomly assigning seven trees in each plot to each method. The CENICAFE-I beater, without a manual resweep, increased the operational yield by 305.7% as compared to that of the traditional manual method. With an immediate, manual resweep, the operational yields were equal for the two methods. The quality of the coffee collected with the CENICAFE-I was lower than that of manual harvesting and was not acceptable by Colombian standards. In order to reduce the cost of harvesting by 10% when using a pneumatically actuated CENICAFE-I beater, one must achieve yields greater than 40 kg h-1 or 60 kg h-1 when operating 400 or 200 h/year, respectively.