Onion: harvesting and post-harvesting mechanized operations

Onion (Allium cepa L.) growing is a widespread farming practice in Italy where a number of both early and late white, yellow, red-tunic onion varieties are cropped which differ in their orgalnoleptic properties as a function of their final use: either consumption as fresh produce or industrial processing. Over the last few years an increase in the price of this vegetable has been registered on the market, which has resulted in a strong impulse towards mechanization of onion cropping operations. Harvesting alone, if performed manually, accounts for more than 50% of total production costs. Mechanized harvesting (by means of onion pullers, windrowers, harvesters and, possibly, stem cutters), instead, results in work productivity 5 to 6 times higher than that of manual operations. Also post-harvesting operations, i.e. produce packaging for presentation on the market should be adequately mechanized to reduce production costs. This obviously calls for a full rearrangement of the entire production cycle from seedbed preparation, to transplantation, harvesting and post-harvesting operations. Now, in consideration of the above remarks, some mechanized onion harvesting and post-harvesting tests were performed with modern machines on plots cropped with modern methods, which gave highly satisfatory results.