Mechanical Pruning in New Olive-Groves

In olive-growing, pruning is essential in order to limit the size of trees and allow easy harvesting as well as to maintain a good reproductive and vegetative balance. Pruning, after olive harvesting, requires the largest utilization of farm labour in the whole crop cycle and the progressive shortage of skilled labour and its increasing cost, force farmers to carry out pruning less often than is necessary. Up to now the contribution of mechanization has been scanty in this field. This paper reports tests of mechanical pruning carried out on 10 year old trees of the cultivar ‘‘Leccino’’. The pruning machine used was provided with rotating saws which were used to cut the sides of the trees. Mechanical pruning required 4manh/100 trees as compared with 128man h/100 trees for hand pruning; a reduction was also obtained over hand pruning, to 21 manh/100 trees, when mechanical pruning was followed by selective hand pruning. Negligible differences in harvest yields were found in the three years following pruning, between any of the three methods.