Advices And Considerations To Actuality Of Vegetable Postharvest Handling In Shanghai

In 2010, the vegetable planting area in Shanghai is about 122666 hm2, including 32867 hm2 that plant vegetable all year long and about 89799 hm2 that plant vegetables from season to season. The total yield amount is about 3.29 million ton, total production value is 5.74 billion yuan, the average yield amount is 324 kg/hm2, and the average production value is 8451 yuan. There is 55% of the vegetable amount is local vegetable, and 90% of the green vegetable is from local. Vegetable Postharvest handling is the key that links the supply chain to the industry chain. In this paper, the main investigation methods include interview, typical investigation and questionnaire, and we investigated the vegetable production enterprises, marketing companies, supermarkets and some other places to study on the actuality of vegetable postharvest handing in Shanghai. The main conclusions are as follow.The vegetable farms, professional cooperatives and marketing companies are the main places of vegetable postharvest handling. The vegetables are cleaned and dressed simply after harvested from the field, and then transport them to the processing workshops by plastic tanks or plastic net bags. In the workshop, the workers grade and package the vegetables according to the requirements of the client. After that, the vegetables are transported to the marketing companies or to the markets directly. The supermarkets seldom do the vegetable Postharvest handling because they request the production enterprises finish this job in the order.The rate of postharvest handled vegetable is quite low, and the mechanization level is even lower than it, so the loss rate reaches to 20%, among which the loss rate of green vegetables is the highest, and this rate in developed countries is blew 5%. The cleaning, washing and grading process of vegetable postharvest handling are mainly done by hand, and the packaging process is semi-mechanized. The vegetable fresh-keeping is mainly realized by cold storage and cold chain transport. The majority of surveyed enterprises precool the vegetables, commonly used forced air pre-cooling method, and some enterprises are equipped with cold storages and refrigerated trucks.Most of the vegetables are sold in the form of primary products in the farmer produce markets, and vegetables with transport packaging sales accounted for 80% of the total. The transport packaging materials includes plastic revolving basket, foam boxes, bags and cartons. In supermarkets and hypermarkets, vegetables in a sales package accounted for about 1/3 of all the vegetables, and sales package mainly includes tray packaging with plastic film, plastic wrap/bag, string bag, tie, etc.. Research, develop and promote the use of green packaging materials to reduce the resources consumption of vegetables is the development direction of this industry.Research results show that vegetable postharvest handling is an important part of vegetable production and marketing in Shanghai. We should make efforts to solve these problems: improve the mechanization level of postharvest handling, establish a sound standardization of vegetable products, construct the cold chain system, guide and train the consumers to consume the cleaned vegetable.