Implantación de un sistema cablecarril en finca productora de plátanos

Abstract

Banana plantation is the most significant subtropical crop of the agricultural economy of the Canary Islands. It is located in the coastal areas of almost all the western islands of the archipelago and it is cultivated on horizontal terraces, sometimes on slopes exceeding 15%. The difficulty of mechanization forces most of the work to be done by hand, and one of the most laborious is the harvesting of the fruit that is done on shoulders, often transporting distances that sometimes exceed 75 m. In the transport process, the fruit suffers damages that detract considerably from its quality, which means a significant reduction in profitability. Other fruit transport systems from the farm to the packaged ones, such as the cableway, are used successfully in other parts of the world where banana trees are grown and where the slope is not limiting. And in some farms of the Canary Islands it is also feasible to implement them. For reasons of scarce slope and extension, as well as the availability of a packing station, a farm has been chosen in the municipality of Los Silos, Tenerife, for the design of the present 2540 meter long cableway project, including the main roads and the secondary ones. Although the project has had a scope, for the purpose of calculating its structures, of only three sections of the road, namely 220 m. Given the identical characteristics of the farm, the profit margen has been extrapolated to the entire farm, comparing the situations before (without cableway) and after (with cableway). In this case the economic results are favorable to the cableway system at 0.023 € per kg transported from the field to the point of stripping in packaging.