On-Farm Cleaning of Agricultural Products to Reduce Harvest Erosion

Leafy vegetables such as spinach or root crops like radish, sugar beet, potato, etc. pick out a significant amount lumps of soil (up to 20% of the product weight) when move out during the harvest practices. This kind of soil that removed from the farm can be called as soil erosion. This adhered soil from the field after harvesting of taproot and tuberous root plants enter to the processing cycle from transportation to marketing, thus more cost pay for the transport of throughput. On the other hand, this soil will be then converted into the municipal solid waste. In addition, more water should be spent for washing and in resulted there is more sewage due to removing of products soil in the consumption time. A good way to prevent these problems is to initial clean and package of agricultural products on the farm. Despite of many developments in the world, using post-harvest cleaning machines in the Iranian farm is in the early stages in which needs to more attention and promotion. Thus, the present article firstly describes the most important new sources of soil loss through product harvesting, and finally attempts to show that on-farm cleaning and packaging of the agricultural products can be prevented from the soil loss due to crop harvesting (SLCH) because of their implementation in the field. It can also be reduced the municipal wastes, decrease the transportation costs, protect the environment, and prevent from the wash water consumption and waste production in the next steps, including in homes.