Avocado Size Picking: How Commercial Growers Harvest Fruit for Maximum Yield
Harvesting avocados is unlike picking almost any other orchard fruit. Because avocados will not soften until they are severed from the stem, trees serve as natural cold storage units for months on end. However, managing how and when you remove fruit from the branch can have a dramatic impact on total grove yield and fruit sizing.
While small-scale and residential growers often pick avocados on demand, commercial operations rely on a strategic harvesting technique known as size picking. Understanding how this process works reveals how fruit development behaves across an entire canopy.
The Difference Between Weekly Harvests and Commercial Size Picks
Depending on the business model of an avocado orchard, harvesting practices look very different from grove to grove:
- Direct-to-Consumer and Small Groves: On our grove, we harvest small quantities every single week. Because we pack and ship boxes directly to customers, picking continuous, steady batches ensures fruit reaches buyers at peak freshness without overwhelming the trees or packing facilities.
- Commercial Scale Groves: Large-scale commercial orchards rarely harvest continuously. Instead, commercial operations coordinate professional picking crews two or three times throughout a harvest window. Rather than stripping an orchard in a single pass, they utilize size picks to balance market demand and orchard health.
Why Avocados on the Same Branch Develop Unevenly
One common misconception among home growers is that all fruit set during spring pollination will develop at an identical rate. In reality, inspecting an active avocado branch reveals significant variation.
During peak bloom, thousands of blossoms open over several weeks. Even when two flowers are pollinated within days of each other on the exact same limb, subtle differences in vascular flow, sunlight exposure, leaf coverage, and natural hormonal distribution lead to varying growth rates. By mid-season, one avocado may have reached an optimal commercial weight while its neighboring fruit remains significantly smaller.
How a Size Pick Works in the Field
When a commercial crew moves through an avocado grove, their objective is precision harvesting:
- Ring Sizing or Visual Calibration: Pickers are trained (often using calibrated harvest rings) to target fruit exceeding a specific diameter or minimum weight threshold.
- Selective Harvesting: Using specialized curved picking shears, crews clip only the largest, market-ready fruit from the canopy, making sure to leave an intact stem button to prevent fungal decay.
- Canopy Relief: Removing the heaviest fruit relieves the tree of substantial weight and metabolic strain.
- Secondary Sizing Period: With the largest fruit off the branches, water and nutrients are redirected to the remaining smaller avocados. Over the next four to eight weeks, these smaller fruit rapidly expand in size before a secondary harvest run.
What Backyard Growers Can Learn from Size Picking
If you have mature avocado trees in your own yard, adopting a size pick strategy can help optimize your harvest. Instead of taking every fruit down at once, inspect your canopy and selectively harvest the largest avocados first. Leaving the smaller avocados on the branch gives them the runway they need to mature, increase their oil content, and reach their full size potential.
Have questions about pruning, irrigating, or harvesting your fruit trees? Reach out to us or explore our tree care guides to learn more about how we manage our family grove.
