Oleh

Sarifah Nurjanah

Universitas Padjadjaran Bandung

Agricultural processing may be defined as an

activity which is performed to maintain or
improve the quality or to change the form or
characteristics of an agricultural product.

Processing operation are undertaken to add

value to agricultural materials after their
production.

The main purpose of agricultural processing is to

minimize the quality and quantity deterioration of
the material after harvest.

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 Procedure that may be used to improve,
maintain and change the product quality :

1. Control storage conditions

a. temperature
b. relative humidity
c. time
2. Kill or inhibit destruction organism
a. Fumigation
b. Refrigeration
c. Heating
3. Improve the physical characteristics
a. changing or maintain the moisture content
b. removal of foreign or dissimilar material
c. sorting into various fractions

Some of the agricultural processing operations :

-Cleaning, grading and sorting

-Size reduction
-Drying
-Handling, packaging and transportation
-Separation (Distillation, membrane, crystalisation etc)
-Extraction
-etc.

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 -Cleaning and grading

The crop after harvesting contain organic and

inorganic impurities like straw, chaff, weed seeds,
iron pieces, stones, mud etc.
-Product with impurities fetch lower price.
-Presence of foreign matters increases the bulk hence
increases cost of handling and transportation.
-Contaminated product cause high losses during
storage.
- It may cause wear and tear in processing machines.

Hence cleaning of agricultural product is very

important and should be performed before any
further processing operation.

Cleaning in agricultural processing generally

means the removal of foreign and undesirable
matters from the desired products.

Cleaning can be accomplished by washing,

screening, hand picking etc.

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 Sorting refers to cseparation of the cleaned
product into various quality fractions that may
be defined on the basis of size, shape, density,
texture and colour.

Grading refers to classification of products into

various quality fractions depending upon the
various commercial values and other usage.

Pemanenan, pengeringan dan sortasi kedelai

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 Equipment for cleaning, grading and sorting

-It is very difficult to clearly differenciate among

the processes of cleaning, grading and sorting
because all of these are carried out
simultaneously with the common procedures.
-The operation of cleaning, grading and sorting
are performed by exploiting the difference in
properties of materials.
-Various type of cleaning, grading and sorting
equipment have been designed and developed on
the basis of properties of product to be handled.

Thus, these equipment can be classified based upon

following characteristics of material :

1. Physical characteristics
a. moisture content
b. unit size
c. unit weight
d. texture
e. color
f. foreign matter
g. shape

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 2. Chemical characteritics
a. analysis (composition)
b. rancidity free fatty acid index
c. odor and flavor
3. Biological
a. germination
b. type and amount of insect damage
c. type and amount of mold damage
d. bacteria count

Pre-cleaner Vibratory sieve Gravity separator

Grading machines

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