Harvest and Postharvest Technology for Fruit, Vegetable, and Chestnuts

Primary/Overarching objective: Identify, develop, and/or apply technology, in the harvest and primarily the postharvest domains, to support the Michigan fruit, vegetable, and chestnut industries in remaining economically and environmentally sustainable. Sub-objectives: 1) Develop concepts, instrumentation, and classification approaches to non-destructively evaluate fruit, vegetable, and chestnut quality characteristics by means of differing spectral or other electronically measurable attributes created by maturity, disease, damage, or insect infestation. Specialty crops of expected focus include cherries, potatoes, and chestnuts. 2) Develop harvest and postharvest concepts and systems for the emerging MI chestnut industry. This objective is to address feasibly sized harvest needs, chestnut processing, and nondestructive sensing and sorting of defective product. 3) Continue investigating means to reduce the volume of water used during the chilling process of tart cherries, while maximizing product quality and more specifically work to implement findings (transfer technology) established under this project in the previous 5-year cycle. 4) Develop orchard automation technology to minimize input costs and environmental footprints through i) over-the-row production options for cherries, and ii) automated pest detection systems. Outputs in general will be a combination of advancements in basic and applied knowledge and under some objectives the output is expected to be prototype and/or commercialized technology working in the field/industry.