Articles
QUALITY OF CARROTS AFTER MECHANIZED CROPPING
The commodity treatment of carrots should be done with use.
This allows to sharply reduce labor costs on cropping and stocking of carrots for storage, as well as to conserve the ultimate yield at the level of hand treatment, thus, requiring a somewhat larger storage capacity for the same volume of commodity products stored.
While stacking up carrots after mechanized cropping in the refrigerator it is necessary that the quality of root crops be brought up to the standards required and be placed just at 0°C, bearing in mind that there is no need in keeping root crops at higher temperatures to heal up the mechanical damages.
In mechanized cropping and commodity treatment of carrots there are three times more operations than in the manual one, thus, causing mechanized damages to root crops.
In 1965–1974, we took into account the number of root crops with visually determined mechanized damages after cropping by several types of pulling and digging out machines and after mechanized treatment, as well as after hand cropping and treatment of carrots.
The estimations showed that the root crops damage as a result of mechanized cropping and treatment comprise from 16.2 to 47.8 per cent, and a result of hand cropping, depending on how carefully it was done, – from 0.4 to 23.0 per cent.
Mechanized damages, especially at a sorting station, lead to considerable losses of root crops from diseases while being kept in store (table 1). When cropped manually (in bench tests) the losses of carrots from diseases are two times lower than when cropped conventionally.
If we take the commercial hand cropping as the standard for the mechanized one the root crops harvested by machines but selected manually are preserved as well as those cropped and selected manually.
The mechanized treatment of carrots at the sorting station causes a sharp increase root crops diseases both after hand and mechanized cropping (table 1).
In one of the experiments manually cropped carrots with no mechanical damages were passed trought a sorting place as a result of which 16.3 per cent of standard root crops were mechanicallt damage (breaking of the tail part, scratches on various parts of root crops, abrasion of the fruit skin, injuries of the flesh up