Being part of a team in our field works.

There is no “I” in TEAM, and often people forget this. In our field, applied Postharvest Technologies, it’s not about “me”, it’s about “us”.

To illustrate this, you can compare it with being part of a gearbox. All gears are important and take one gear away and the whole system fails.

When the system fails, often the farmer’s biggest concern is how to get it fixed.

However, in the case of failed quality delivery, apart from causing irreversible reputation damage, one should look at why the system failed and how to prevent it in the future, often it is in the last 5% of the process that the irreversible damage occurs.

Often, farmers, their staff and exporters are ill-equipped to identify the cause of such problems, ultimately leading to their recurrence.

The big and interesting point is to understand how nature works and to implement a route cause analysis approach. Stop chasing symptoms and tackle the source.

The first important issue at hand is that nature never ever breaks her own laws.

Not yesterday, not today and not tomorrow.

The second important issue is that water and air are extremely smart. They are on earth for nearly 4.4 billion years and although they never attaint a degree, a master’s, or an MBA, however they always take the shortest route and the path of the lowest resistance.

Once you understand these base principles, a lot falls in place.

When I see that the industry wants to implement various measurements to tackle symptoms of amazingly simple natural process’, I cannot avoid having a grin on my face.

Only last week, somebody told me that the industry is using “anti-shrivel” sheets for stone fruit. The route cause is again not being tackled.

Or two weeks ago, a “industry professional”, introduced a sophisticated “water loss meter for fruit” in the apple and Pear industry.

Nice to measure this, but it is too late, you should not lose the water out of your fruit.

Again, chasing symptoms and not the root cause.

Preventive measurements are defined as the regular performance of management decisions and practices to avoid future quality problems.

An important first step in any positive proper postharvest system implementation program is learning to identify the causes of quality failure, especially when you did grow a near-perfect product.

Once the cause of failure is determined, one can take steps to avoid the problem in the future.

That is the purpose of this video: to give farmers, staff, and exporters some insight into pieces of knowledge to identify causes of quality failure due to neglected postharvest treatments and most importantly ridiculous timings without reacting properly.

If you can work with “open” fruit, i.e. not in a closed box, we can work in the window of opportunity.

And now you know for yourself how your process works.

For a lot of fruit, you are talking about a limited time span before it goes inside bags, punnets, and boxes, unless you pack without liners which gives you a bigger window to work in.

If you store open fruit for longer, you have a bigger window to work in.

Think in this regard on what you do when you store products inside your fridge in the kitchen.

You wrap your products before they dry out, same happens in your cold rooms.

There are internationally accepted rules of thumb, known in the industry and we have been saying this for over 20 years in South Africa. But what is scary is that it is known as rules for over 60 years. So, nothing new there as there are articles from 1956 to prove this.

That makes it simple: it’s tried, tested, proven. Simple.

What is the spine-chilling part which results in visible quality problems, not just once, every time, and even not always visible at the farm at the time of packing your product?

Recently somebody made a remark: “the produce left us in good condition”, Problems are visible on the shelves within 3–4 days after harvest.

No proper pre-cooling with too low RH, too high wind speeds, too long delays, too hot transport and you have exactly what you have now: too many quality problems.

95% of all the work is done nearly perfect by nearly 99% of all farmers. But it simply doesn’t stop there. It’s the last 5% that is also important.

As the majority often harvests in hot temperatures, it’s only logical that you lose shelf life if you do not take these factors into account.

Explaining this in a simple video would be hopeless, but we gladly join your team to address the cause of this.

Nature never ever breaks her own laws, not yesterday, not today or tomorrow, and preserving quality after harvest does not come by chance.

Ask our clients where we are part of the Team, which value we add…

If you want to do it right, first time, every time, we are your partners. Humiditas, visit our website on www.humiditas.com and check what our clients say.