1.7 General Crop Harvesting

• The meaning and importance of the harvesting process
• Factors that determine harvesting: timing, stage of growth, purpose
• Signs of maturity in cereals, vegetables and tubers
• Pre-harvest practices
• Harvesting methods and tools
• Harvesting of cereals, vegetables and tubers
• Post-harvest practices: drying, cleaning, grading, packing and storage
• Post-harvest losses and how to reduce them

• explain factors that determine harvesting of a crop produce
• carry out the harvesting process for selected crop produce
• acknowledge the importance of harvesting process in crop production

“How does harvesting process affect the quantity and quality of crop produce?”

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1. Meaning and importance of harvesting
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   What harvesting is, why the process includes pre-harvest and post-harvest work, and how timing and handling decide quantity and quality of Kenyan produce.
2. Factors that determine harvesting
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   Timing, stage of growth and purpose decide the harvest day, with weather, labour, market and the pesticide PHI sitting under timing.
3. Signs of maturity in cereals
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   Field signs that maize, sorghum, wheat and rice are ready, including husk, grain hardness, black layer, colour and the risk of harvesting too wet or too late.
4. Signs of maturity in vegetables and tubers
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   How to tell tomato, kale, cabbage and Kenyan tubers are ready, including breaker colour, leaf size, skin set and why late is not always more food.
5. Pre-harvest practices
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   The jobs that make harvest possible: PHI, scouting, labour, clean containers, paths, last weeding, and stopping irrigation so potato skins set.
6. Harvesting methods and tools
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   Picking, cutting, digging and combining, matched to Kenyan crops, and why the container is as much a tool as the knife.
7. Harvesting maize and other cereals
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   Carry out the dry-maize sequence - pick, dry, shell, store - and compare wheat, rice and sorghum, keeping grain dry to avoid mould.
8. Harvesting tomato, kale and tubers
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   Carry out gentle, cool, often harvests of tomato and kale, and lift tubers without spearing them, keeping shade and sorting damaged produce out.
9. Post-harvest handling
   40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
   Drying, cleaning, grading, packing and storing cereals and vegetables so quality and safety hold after the produce leaves the plant.
10. Post-harvest losses
    40 min · 1 practice tasks · quiz
    Where Kenyan cereals and vegetables disappear after harvest, and the practices that keep bags and bunches as food rather than mould, bruise, pests and spill.