The harvesting period is a crucial part of the production process. Anything that can be done to minimise damage to fruit or reduce the incidence of other storage diseases will improve storability and marketable out turns as well as help to minimise patulin risk in any fruit sold for processing.
- Start the harvest as clean as possible by cleaning bulk bins before harvest to minimise carry-over of diseases to the new crops going into store.
- Careful supervision of picking will help to minimise bruising damage. It is important that all fruit with skin damaged or flesh exposed, as well as diseased fruit is rejected at the time of picking and left in the orchard.
- All soil contaminated fruit should also be rejected because it will have increased risk of rotting.
- Avoid getting leaves and pieces of branch in with fruit in bins.
- Avoid exposure of bins to rain as splash can be an important cause of disease spread.
- Significant bruising can occur to fruit in transport from orchard to store or packhouse.
- Make sure that tractor drivers are as aware as pickers of the critical points where fruit bruising can occur.
- When periods of rainfall occur during harvest it is essential to minimise mud contamination of fruit and equipment.
- Do not leave harvested fruit out in the orchard overnight, move it to a hard standing area to await loading into store.
- Fruit should be placed in cold store as soon as possible after harvest and ideally within 18 hours.