thumb|Drying and bagging of peanuts in [[Jiangxia District, Hubei, China]] In agriculture, postharvest handling is the stage of crop production immediately following harvest, including cooling, cleaning, sorting and packing. The instant a crop is removed from the ground, or separated from its parent plant, it begins to deteriorate. Postharvest treatment largely determines final quality, whether a crop is sold for fresh consumption, or used as an ingredient in a processed food product.
thumb|Drying and bagging of peanuts in [[Jiangxia District, Hubei, China]] In agriculture, postharvest handling is the stage of crop production immediately following harvest, including cooling, cleaning, sorting and packing. The instant a crop is removed from the ground, or separated from its parent plant, it begins to deteriorate. Postharvest treatment largely determines final quality, whether a crop is sold for fresh consumption, or used as an ingredient in a processed food product.
==Goals== thumb|left|Drying chili peppers. [[Milyanfan, Kyrgyzstan]] The most important goals of post-harvest handling are to keep the product cool and safe, to avoid moisture loss and slow down undesirable chemical changes, and avoiding physical damage such as bruising, to delay spoilage. Sanitation is also an important factor, to reduce the possibility of pathogens that could be carried by fresh produce, for example, as residue from contaminated washing water.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).