The harvesting of citrus fruit represents 35–45% of total production cost. Hence, an improvement in the efficiency of this one operation has a significant effect upon enterprise viability and profitability. The traditional manual harvesting method is very labour intensive, and thus expensive.Mechanical harvesting methods have been widely researched and significantly improved. This is illustrated by the large amount of research data available and reviewed in this paper. The performances of the air shaking, trunk shaking, limb shaking and canopy shaking mechanical harvesting systems are briefly summarised. The results of several tree shaping and orchard layout studies have been included because the operating environment of the mechanical harvester affects its performance.