Design, development and performance evaluation of a tractor operated olive harvester

To speed up the olive harvesting process, a tractor-driven olive harvesting machine was designed and manufactured at the Institute of Agricultural Engineering (AEI), Islamabad. This newly developed equipment was tested on the Bari Zaitoon-I cultivar for its performance evaluation. This innovative technology has proven valuable in efficiently replacing expensive manual harvesting operations with timely and economic alternative. It was experimentally evaluated at different PTO speeds, stroke lengths (SL), and vertical clamp positions (CP) on the tree to find the harvested and leftover fruit (%) and field capacity (trees/h) of the machine. Data collected was statistically analyzed by using “Statistix 8.1” software at a 5 % le vel of probability. The best results were recorded as 92.4 % harvested fruit, 7.6 % leftover fruit and 23.6 trees/h field capacity at the PTO speed of 300 rpm along with the stroke length of 10 cm and clamp position of 1 m on the tree trunk from the ground. The use of the developed equipment will make it possible to harvest olives in a shorter time than with manual harves ting without reducing the quality and weight of the obtained products.