The grading of fruits and vegetables is said to be one of the most important tasks for the producers as it adds value to the products and gives better economic returns.
Manual grading is quite expensive and time-consuming process. Moreover, the process gets affected due to non-availability of labours during the peak seasons. Keeping this in mind, the ICAR-CIAE, Bhopal came up with a Fruit-cum-Vegetable Grader for the farmers.
The ICAR-Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering, Bhopal a few years back demonstrated its Fruit-cum-Vegetable Grader developed under the Mera Gaon Mera Gaurav Programme to a farmer named Madan Mohan Patidar in Bhopal for the grading of onion, sweet lemon, and guava. After being satisfied by the grader, Madan got the grader installed for grading 250 tons of onions on his farm.
The capacity of the grader made by ICAR-CIAE, Bhopal is 2 t/h. Therefore, the grader can easily grade around 250 tonnes of onion in sixteen days considering 8 hours of operations per day.
Saves time, labor, and cost of grading
Due to this, the grader helps in saving a lot of time, labor, and cost of grading with efficient grading. On using the grader, the cost of operation of the grader is Rs. 300 per tonnes that makes a total cost of Rs. 75,000 for grading of 250 tonnes of onion. In this way, the grader helped Madan in saving Rs. 1,25,000 in cost (63 percent).
The cost of onion without grading is Rs. 400 per quintal. However, the price obtained for the graded onion is Rs. 700 per quintal.
This helped Madan gain a net benefit of Rs. 7,50,000 from 250 tonnes of graded onion. The graded uniform size onions fetched more prices in the market. Thus, the overall benefit from the marketing of graded onion using the ICAR-CIAE Fruit-cum-Vegetable Grader for the farmer is Rs. 7,50,000. Besides this, it saves a lot of time and gives efficient results.
Source - ICAR-Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering
