The machine for collecting cucumbers must be ... manual

Until now, despite the widespread spread of mechanization in the harvesting of various vegetable crops, the ideal cucumber harvesting machine still remains an unattainable dream of collective and farm households. What is the secret here?

There is no secret here. It is enough to pay attention to the biological feature of the cucumber, in part similar to tomato. Both vegetable crops are not maturing at the same time, i.e. From four to five cucumber fruits of market maturity, only one can reach, the others still have to. The situation is complicated by the fact that, unlike tomatoes, cucumbers first come to market maturity and only then biological one. Thus, on the one hand, picking cucumbers should be done every 2-3 days, and on the other hand - to meet the deadlines: 10-15 days after the ovary. Then cucumbers are no longer suitable as fruit and vegetable products.

The development of aggregates for mechanical harvesting of cucumbers has long been carried out in many countries, in particular in the USSR, the USA and Hungary. However, even when prototypes were launched into mass production, they were not widely available and, in the long run, were unprofitable compared to low-productivity manual labor. Especially in a market economy, where an impeccable marketable appearance of vegetables plays a decisive role.

First of all, about any safety of plants during mechanical assembly is out of the question: any machine for harvesting cucumbers damages whips, picking them up and separating the fruits, which also gets "on nuts." This is inevitably imposed by the low productivity of such a machine because of the design features. They exert a strong influence on the crop in the direction of its reduction and wide row spacing, convenient for the aggregate, but consuming in vain useful area. At the same time, a high cropping culture should prevail on the cucumber plantations, otherwise the machine will fail before it is set due to the constant clogging of the fruit separators, which are very sensitive to the contamination of crops. Of course, no machine to collect cucumbers is able to selectively collect the fruits of the fruit, leaving the rest to ripen.

So, when you harvest the "Egyptian vegetable", you can not do without manual labor? So far, alas. But you can make it much more productive, and with the help of all the same technology.

Five years ago on the Internet the news about the use of a tractor trailer in Belarus for harvesting cucumbers, more reminiscent of the airplane of the beginning of the 20th century, was accompanied by a squall of snide comments. Like, look at what heights the Belarusian agricultural machinery has achieved!

It seems that the skeptics would have calmed down considerably if they had put two baskets of cucumbers for comparison: one after the collection by the car, the other by people on the "airplane". In addition, the information that harvesting cucumbers in Estonia and Austria is carried out using exactly the same aggregates, for some reason did not cause bilious ridicule.

And the advantages are obvious. At a tractor speed of about 1 km / h, ten workers have time to collect only the commodity fruits. In this case, plants are not damaged. The rows are thick. The period of fruiting and labor productivity are increasing.

And if such a "half-hand" machine for harvesting cucumbers turns out to be more productive and more perfect than all the wonders of technology created before it, why not use it?