Felix Instruments, a leading ag-tech instrument developer, has announced major improvements to its latest instrument, the F-751 Avocado Quality Meter.
The Avocado Quality Meter, which was released in January 2019, enables growers and packers to accurately and non-destructively estimate the dry matter of Hass avocados while still on the tree.
With Felix’s latest firmware upgrade, the Avocado Quality Meter can now effectively measure fruit to an accuracy of within 1.15 dry matter (DM) units on a single fruit and 0.83 DM units on fruit in lots of five, the group said.
Dry matter is the primary metric avocado growers and packers rely on to judge fruit maturity and traditionally, the process to assess dry matter is both time and labour-intensive.
Using either microwave ovens or food dehydrators, measuring dry matter requires destructively taking avocado samples, weighing them, drying them and weighing them again. Then, repeating this process over the course of the growing season, destroying large numbers of valuable avocados in the process.
According to Felix Instruments, the Avocado Quality Meter 'completely changes' this process. Using near-infrared light and within a matter of seconds, the avocado producer can accurately assess avocado dry matter - saving time, saving fruit and often, increasing the accuracy of their dry matter assessments.
What has already been a ground-breaking instrument has been improved further, increasing the instrument’s accuracy and reliability.
“We are extremely excited about our latest advancements in accuracy,” remarked Scott Trimble, marketing director for Felix Instruments. “With our ongoing partnership with Dr Jorge Osuna at INIFAP, our application scientists have made multiple trips to Mexico to both collect data and meet with local avocado growers and packers to test our improved avocado model. Our mission is to always be improving and optimising our tools. With that in mind, we’re producing an incredible instrument now and we are continuing to work on making it even better.”
The Avocado Quality Meter marks the first in Felix’s line of commodity specific quality meters.
“A number of commodities rely on brix and dry matter as markers of maturity”, Trimble added. “We’re deep in development and working with a collection of worldwide partners with the goal of launching additional commodity specific quality meters this year.”
