Project Alpha: Making Olive Harvesting Easier

Agroworld by DI ZIO S.R.L. is a company in the start-up phase (visit us on facebook and our project web site). Our business is about making a significant contribution to innovation within agricultural technology by the design, construction and sales of Agricultural machines and products.

The general manager is 29 year old Luca Di Zio, who for 5 years has led the company with an inventive business outlook.

Our business idea is to offer a wide range of products and equipment to offer innovative technological solutions to aid agricultural processing. Making agricultural mechanization more accessable.

In particular we are focussing on agricultural tools that will make fruit harvesting easier.

We do also supply other equipment, sundries, and seeds.

What we would like to do: Our project Alpha

We want to manufacture and supply to farmers, an automatic tool capable of easily and efficiently harvesting olives for the production of Extra virgin olive oil. The tool consists of a double rake with a pneumatically powered movement mounted on a telescopic pole, lightweight and quiet.

Compared to the traditional method of manual harvesting the tool will offer three major advantages to farmers:

1 Allow the the farmer to work safely from the ground without the need for ladders or hazardous tree climbing.

2 Less physical effort required from the farmer compared to the manual method

3 Reduction of harvest time by up to 80% compared to the manual method.

Results of the Alpha prototype

A prototype of the Alpha pneumatic rake has already been built and used to test and assess its functionality. The Alpha prototype was given to a farmer to be used for the harvesting of 1000 Italian Lecciono Olive trees (Olea europaea L.) which are the most common in the world.

We gave the possibility of using Alpha directly to the farmer plantation owner.

The result was surprising: Harvesting rates of approxiamately 80 – 90 kg of olives per hour were achieved with a total harvest of 80 000 Kg.