Controlled Atmosphere Rooms for Apples and Pears
Some twenty-five years back, I made a statement that to date still reverberates in the industry: “If you put manure in a cold room you get cold manure out.”
That statement is still valid, yet people do not seem to understand the full meaning of it. To elaborate on it, if you put top quality fruit in a cold room and your systems blow it up, you are sitting with a problem as you get the cold produce out, damaged by your own systems.
Be honest, you grow a perfect or near-perfect product in the orchard and are busy for up to 8–9 months to get there. Yet, whilst doing everything perfect with great efforts, you still get quality issues. Even after you did everything right.
Till you harvest that is. Think. How is it possible that you grow the perfect product and year after year you have quality issues?
Think again. Sit back and let your mind wander over all these so-called experts that have told you that “their process” is right. Everything they do after harvest is perfect. So why do you have quality problems?
Everything is 100%, so how is that possible?
Year after year, nothing changes in the quest to pay attention to details and you keep on getting quality issues.
Why? Because nature never ever breaks her own laws. Simple.
And if you do not change anything and expect a different result, Einstein covered that: It is the highest form of insanity.
This article handles on Apples and Pears.
Interesting on this subject is that a lot has been and is studied the whole time.
I sat in a Zoom meeting this week from the South African CA workgroup and to my surprise I found a couple of interesting statements and presentations.
Firstly, a renowned industry figure head stated that for a certain apple they still use the CA storage data for storing the apples from 1960. That is over 60 years ago.
Secondly, a company presented their material and they now introduce a sophisticated fruit water loss meter to measure the water the fruit lost and adjust the cooling regimes accordingly.
Thirdly, not once is there an effort being done or planned to see what RH does to the storage of the apple and pears.
I will go into detail later.
When you harvest at the proper maturity, it is important to start the postharvest process as soon as possible and bring harvest Bins to the cold rooms asap.
Currently, a lot of pre-sorting gets done where the produce goes either in a Regulated Atmosphere (RA) room first or goes directly in a Controlled Atmosphere (CA) room.
There are two items that must be looked upon besides cooling: RH and Ethylene with Airborne Bacteria removal.
RA rooms should be equipped to look after both.
When you come into a room and you smell fruit your fruit, you are in trouble.
Controlled Atmosphere rooms in the Apple and Pear industry are different cattle of fish.
These specialized rooms are a different proposition, but in saying that RH is also of utmost importance.
You harvest, load bins with fruit on the field, either pre-sort, or put them straight into the room.
Usually this takes 3–4 days. In that period the products get gradually cooled down and then “the lock” goes on, the atmosphere gets regulated and your product gets stored for a number of months in a fully closed, controlled atmospheric environment at he “ideal regime in the ideal temperatures”.
Right.
Now it comes. The design engineers tell you that their rooms are designed to maintain 95% RH.
As stated above, they now even have fancy measuring devices to see how much water the fruit lost.
I have got news for you, then it is already to late.
All the protocols describe this and when you open the room, after the intended storage period, your RH levels pretty much show 95%.
Let us analyze this a bit deeper.
Did you measure your RH levels at the start of the process?
Do you know what the RH % was when you started off?
No.
99.9% of all growers and CA operators NEVER EVER measure this up front.
I can tell you that over a time span of 25 years and our measurements, the average starting RH is between 38 and 48% depending on the area and the local environment.
Now you have locked the produce in a vault, 100% closed, airtight.
Now your CA cooling installation does what it is designed to do, cool your fruit, and get the correct regime in place, which ever that might be…
Did you ever take notice when exactly the defrost is happening and when it happens the most?
It is in the first two to three weeks after you closed the room.
Think about this one: in this closed, vault like room, completely and hermetically closed, where do you think the water from the defrost comes from?
Really, where can it come from?
From your fruit.
Because nature never ever breaks her own laws.
And to proof that, what happens with the harvesting height of the bins after the CA period?
They all go down.
Not because you have a vibrating floor to get your fruit snuggled up or because you have a flashing disco light organ in there going with some serious party music…
Because your systems withdraw water from your fruit. With the necessary quality problems and extra stress on your fruit.
It is not just about weight loss, it is about avoiding shrivel, keeping fresh looking stems and a fresher less stressed fruit.
Therefore, you lose fruit that you could pack out and that could give you extra profits without having to fork out extra costs compared to the usual input costs.
It is a simple as one and one is two.
We did the tests and have results. Spectacular results.
For over 50 years, scientists, researchers, universities, technical institutions, and technical research facilities have been studying and writing about it, yet, in the field, it is still getting ignored.
Why?
It also looks as every 10 years someone else is making a study over the exact same problems.
There are damages and losses that occur each year, simply because people still take chances with RH as well.
You cannot. It is that simple.
It took me many years to understand the fact that it is remarkably simple, you must just understand nature. That is all.
Every marketing guru will ask the professional photographer to depict fruit with water drops on to make it look fresh…
They do, worldwide…
It looks fresh, but that is all and it is not the place to put water on top of your fruit. It is to late.
If you want to know where, when and what we do to get proper dry RH into your rooms when it matters to your quality, even at -4°C that will give you extra pack outs with a better quality fruit, talk to us.
We avoid the bloopers between harvest and delivery to your client, and there are plenty of pitfalls, and mistakes are made, the whole time.
The sad part is that you often do not see the damage at the source, but one thing is for sure, the damage is cumulative, irreversible and will show in the process one or other time.
How on earth can that be addressed and avoided?
By talking to people that understand the process and will help you along the process to get it right first time every time.
Preserving quality after harvest does not come by chance.
It is about knowing where and how to put in which technology at the right time.
Experience is the name of the game.
