AN ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF ALTERNATIVE POSTHARVEST PEACH HANDLING SYSTEMS

This paper continues the work of the Postharvest Research Team in developing a method to estimate the economic value of quality characteristics and use that information in postharvest investment decisions. A hedonic price function is developed that assigns a monetary value to quality characteristics of peaches harvested in Georgia for the commercial market.

The value of peach characteristics are estimated for size, amount of damage, color, and firmness. Knowing the marginal implicit prices of these characteristics, two different handling methods are examined to determine the impact of varied quality on the price of peaches at the wholesale and retail level. The two handling systems explored are centralized packing and field packing. For each system, the quality attributes were measured in 1987 at the warehouse and retail levels. The differences in quality between the two systems are determined and the consequent difference in prices received are estimated.