| High-quality
produce, free of disease, with superior shelf-life is a result
of sound farm management, proper harvesting methods, and proper
post-harvest handling and storage.
You and your farming team have selected the seed, planted
the crop, nurtured it through adverse weather and insect attack.
Now, after months of caring for the fields, the crop is at
its peak, a satisfying harvest of beautiful fruits or vegetables.
You want to ensure that your customers will be happy to pay
top prices for this excellent produce.
| How can you best maintain
the quality and safety of your produce as it travels
from the field to the table?
What should be done to protect the crop while you may
have to wait for market demand to strengthen? |
Answer: Before storage or shipment the
crop must be pre-cooled.
Why?
● Refrigerated containers do not have the
power required to remove heat from most warm
crops. The heat produced by respiration can overload the
refrigeration system, and
the produce will have lost most or all or its shelf-life
before the rate heat from
respiration slows sufficiently to allow cooling. But then
the economic value is lost.
● Most cold storage facilities are designed to
hold crops at the desired temperature,
protecting them from outside conditions of heat, wind, sun
and humidity. They do
not have sufficient refrigeration capacity to hold crops
and cool them also. When
warm crops are introduced to a cold storage room holding
cool crops the temperature
of the cool crops will increase as heat is transferred from
the warm crop. This
temperature increase causes the cool crops to experience
and increase in respiration,
generating more heat. The result can be significant losses
in shelf-life and weight.
The solution to these potential problems
is to cool the crop before it is loaded or
stored. This process is known as “pre-cooling”.
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