Crescimento de frutos e aptidão à colheita mecanizada de cultivares de café arábica

Abstract

Studying coffee trees is important to produce new knowledge that helps technologically in the production system. This work aimed to evaluate plants of different Coffea arabica cultivars in relation to fruit development and aspects of manual and mechanized harvesting. To achieve the objective, three studies were carried out. The first evaluated fruit development, through the accumulation of dry mass, in the period between floral anthesis and fruit senescence. The second study evaluated the adaptation of cultivars in relation to mechanized harvesting. And the third investigation was related to the damage caused between manual and mechanized harvesting. The results of the first study showed that the greatest accumulation of dry mass in fruits occurs after the greatest accumulation of dry mass in grains. The increase in dry mass in fruits in the final stages of development was due to the increase in dry mass in the peel. In the second study, the existence of variability between genotypes was verified for parameters related to mechanized harvesting. It was possible to observe that cultivars Topázio MG 1190, MGS Paraíso 2 and the progeny H514-7-8-2 stood out for their fruit stripping efficiency. For the third study, the cultivars MGS Ametista and Paraíso MG H419-1 stood out in the mechanized harvesting system because they did not present high vegetative damage. It was also possible to verify that the detachment force of the fruits was an important characteristic when analyzing the damage caused by harvesting, whether manual or mechanized. Together, understanding the results can guide the most appropriate processes to achieve the best results in coffee crop management, such as the best fertilization period, fruit harvesting point and the most suitable cultivars for mechanized and manual harvesting.