MANIZALES, Caldas, Colombia – Assisted coffee harvesting tests and trials are promising, while fight against rust shows important advances, the second day of the 85th National Coffee Growers Congress made public today.
The Chief Technical Officer of the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC), Hernando Duque, showed the Congress delegates the results of the tests on methods that represent a viable alternative to optimize harvesting and reduce labor costs without sacrificing the high quality of Colombian coffee.
Evaluations in the field of canvases on which ripe fruits are dropped have yielded substantial increases in volumes collected by operator with respect to the traditional method.
“The change in mentality of those involved in coffee harvesting is required to use canvases and devices that increase yields in this activity,” Duque highlighted before the Coffee Congress attendees.
The Brudden device (with a kind of shaking hand incorporated) and the Alpha prototype (an electric machine that works with batteries that last over one day) have also yielded major increases in the amount of harvested beans.
Duque reminded that there have been assisted harvesting Field Days attended by coffee farmers, federated leaders, representatives of coffee growers cooperatives and private agents from the Caldas, Huila, Antioquia and Santander departments.
In the field days, participants have been able to experiment with the devices, either prototypes developed by Cenicafé or brought from countries such as Brazil and Italy and adapted to the local conditions by researchers of Cenicafé’ Mechanical Engineering area.
As a complement to these efforts, the FNC has explored alternative innovation mechanisms through a global call, in response to which 64 proposals were received from 15 countries, of which 59% are from researchers, 32% from entrepreneurs (startups) and 9% from established companies; 62% of the registered proposals came from Colombia.
