Design, building and testing of a transplanting mechanism for strawberry plants of bare root on mulched soil

C Gutiérrez,J.M Cabrera,N Saldaña,C Gracia,R Serwatowski

doi:10.5424/sjar/2009074-1093

C Gutiérrez, J.M Cabrera + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5424/sjar/2009074-1093

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Abstract

In order to reduce costs of hand-transplanting of strawberry crop, a transplanting mechanism (module) was designed, built and tested, as a main component of the transplanter for bare root plants on mulched soils, which design is carried on. The transplanter should be used with an existing irrigation system, that must be able to supply water by sections and allows to irrigate as soon as the transplanting operation finishes. The principle of operation of proposed machine is based on the transplanting module, which remains in a short contact with the ground and comprises mechanisms such as a cutter, a hook and a clamp to make automatically operations of cutting the plastic, hide the cut plastic and insert the plant in the ground. Relative movement between module and main frame of the transplanter is used as a sequential actuation source for its mechanisms. A prototype of the transplanting module and a testing device were built to evaluate the performance of the module main components in laboratory conditions. A 100% of plastic cuts made by the cutter were correct. Plastic hiding activity was satisfactory in 95% of repetitions. Placement of the plants by clamp, was satisfactory in 95% of the tests, that means a good plant insertion (crown covered by soil), and 85% of transplanted plants were correctly oriented. The module showed a satisfactory general performance, which allowed to prove the technical feasibility of the proposed concept as a principle of design of the transplanter for bare-root strawberry plants on mulch soil.

Highlights

One of the crops, which mechanization has been experiencing a slow progress, is strawberry (Fragaria vesca) and this is not due to its marginal importance
While in many other crops, seeding and transplanting operations have been mechanized successfully, strawberry vegetative propagation system has been imposed over the propagation in vitro and ex vitro growing methods (López-Aranda, 2003), so that majority of cultivated strawberry in the world is transplanted by hand, with daughter plants of mother plants, that have been developed for this purpose in nurseries
The operational concept that incorporates the use of the proposed transplanter, consists of two steps: plastic mulch and drip irrigation pipe must be placed in the soil in state of permanent wilting point (PWP); there must be a hydraulic system with valves around the field in order to activate the irrigation by sections, preferably one valve for each row

Summary

Introduction

One of the crops, which mechanization has been experiencing a slow progress, is strawberry (Fragaria vesca) and this is not due to its marginal importance. While in many other crops, seeding and transplanting operations have been mechanized successfully, strawberry vegetative propagation system has been imposed over the propagation in vitro and ex vitro growing methods (López-Aranda, 2003), so that majority of cultivated strawberry in the world is transplanted by hand, with daughter plants of mother plants, that have been developed for this purpose in nurseries. O’Dell (1998) indicated that is more viable to growth rootball strawberry plants than build a transplanter able to operate in forced production systems (mulched soils with polyethylene). Transplanting one hectare of strawberry requires at least a group of 20 persons working a whole day (Sanz, 2002). The cost of this labor raises dramatically production costs of crop, so that mechanization seems to be en effective solution

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