Minikiv – a new project of the Warsaw University of Life Sciences

The project is financed by the Rural Development Program for 2014-2020 under Measure 16 “Cooperation” will be implemented until the end of 2022.

The project was prepared and submitted by dr hab. Piotr Latocha, prof. SGGW from the Institute of Horticultural Sciences together with dr inż. Monika Janaszek-Mańkowska from the Institute of Mechanical Engineering. Most of the research is carried out in these two institutes, but the project also involves employees of two other institutes – Food Sciences and Human Nutrition Sciences.

The task of the project is to achieve two main goals: 1.developing the optimal post-harvest procedure for these new fruits (including post-harvest temperature regime, sorting procedure and long-term refrigerated storage conditions); and 2. designing and making a prototype of a mini kiwi fruit sorting module non-invasively in terms of the degree of maturity (development and validation of algorithms for assessing the degree of fruit maturity and construction of a fully functional prototype of an automatic sorting device with a vision module).

The works are carried out as part of a consortium which includes, apart from SGGW as a leader, also partners – a mini kiwi grower from the province Mazowieckie, where the storage experiments will be carried out, and the Mazowiecki Agricultural Advisory Center in Warsaw, whose task will be to popularize the results of the project among farmers interested in growing mini kiwi. The authors hope that the results of the project will contribute to increasing interest in this still new crop among fruit growers.

Also read: Minikwi from SGGW on shop shelves