Vegetable Transplanter Research Articles

Development of a walk-behind type hand tractor powered vegetable transplanter for paper pot seedlings

A 9.75 kW walk-behind type hand tractor powered 2-row fully automatic vegetable transplanter for individual paper pot seedlings was developed by considering the power availability, paper pot dimensions and space availability in the hand tractor after the complete removal of rotavator tillage assembly. It consisted of two sets of feeding conveyor, metering conveyor, seedling drop tube, furrow opener, soil covering device, an automatic feeding mechanism, a depth adjustment wheel and hitching arrangement. Horizontal slat-type chain conveyor was used as feeding conveyor and horizontal pusher type chain conveyor was used as metering conveyor. The automatic feeding mechanism, with a timing shaft, cam and clutch, was used to coordinate the working of feeding and metering conveyors. The vegetable transplanter carried 108 seedlings on two feeding conveyors in upright orientation, fed them to the metering conveyors and planted them in upright orientation in furrows. The performance of the vegetable transplanter was evaluated for transplanting tomato at 45 × 45 cm spacing in the field at a forward speed of 0.9 km h−1. Field capacity of the transplanter was found to be 0.026 ha h−1. It resulted in the saving of 68% labour and 80% time over the conventional method of manual transplanting. The planting rate of the transplanter was found to be 32 pot seedlings min−1 with 4% missed planting and 5% tilted planting. The soil covering efficiency of the developed vegetable transplanter was about 81% and the quality of transplanting was satisfactory.

Improved design and experiments of small-size vegetable transplanter

Improved design and experiments of small-size vegetable transplanter

Development of a full-automatic vegetable transplanter mounted on the power tiller

Development of a full-automatic vegetable transplanter mounted on the power tiller

채소정식기용 로터리 식부장치 개발

Vegetable transplanting operation has been wholly depended on human labor that needs 18.4 hrs per 10 acres in Korea. Since periods of vegetable transplanting operations are limited, their mechanization has been strongly demanded. This study was conducted to develop a transplanting device that was the core technology for vegetable transplanter. In order to find out transplanting track and velocity of transplanting device, a kinematic analysis software was employed. Evaluation of prototype was carried out in the circular soil bin with high speed camera. Rotary type transplanting device produced an elliptic loci when two links of different lengths were moving to the opposite direction. The length of two links was 75mm and 44mm, respectively. Maximum displacement of rotary type transplanting device was 238mm. It seemed that the transplanting elliptic loci of transplanting device were identical between the simulation output generated by kinematic analysis software and the circular soil bin test result with a high speed camera. The rotary type transplanting device can be suitable fur transplanting short height vegetable, less than 20 cm length vegetables such as Chinese cabbage and cabbage, etc.