Workforce management and evaluation of coffee harvest indicators in Colombia Gestión de la mano de obra y evaluación de indicadores de recolección de café en Colombia.

To contribute to the search for alternatives that make it possible to compensate for workforce shortage in coffee harvesting in Colombia, a workforce management strategy for coffee harvest was employed in two Cenicafé experiment stations. Different plots of the same size were assigned to a certain number of pickers (groups of 1, 2, 4 and 6) to evaluate the collection indicators and to establish the relationship with operational performance (kg h -1). The number of ripe fruits left on the tree (efficiency), number of ripe and green fruits left on the ground (losses), number of green fruits in the harvested mass (harvest quality) and the time to carry out the work were recorded. No relationship was observed between the operational performance of each group of pickers with the picking indicators. However, the analysis of the harvesting efficiency alone showed that the average operational yields in the groups of 1, 2 and 6 pickers assigned per plot, were statistically higher than the national average yield of coffee harvesting (11.8 kg h -1), which indicates that groups of 1 or 2 pickers could collect the same amount of coffee as groups of up to 6 operators per plot. This result shows the possibility of establishing strategies for coffee harvesting with few pickers and jointly implement new picking systems developed by Cenicafé in workforce shortage scenarios.