ISHS Acta Horticulturae 72: Symposium on the Timing of Field vegetable Production
THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOMATIC TRANSPLANTERS |
| Author: | W. Boa |
| Abstract:
Manual transplanting has a high labour cost. With current machines, some of which have been in production for more than ten years, work rates with lettuces and cabbages average about 1 500 plants/operator/ hour. Thus, for example, about 66 operator hours is needed for transplanting a hectare of lettuces. Attempts to reduce the labour requirement by improving existing machines have shown little advantage and preloading the magazines of semi-automatic machines has been costly in labour. Work in the USA and Holland aimed at the development of a fully automatic transplanter has not resulted in equipment suitable for field vegetable crops. At the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering a method of producing plant containers suitable for mechanised transplanting has been developed and work is now proceeding on methods of handling the containers and planting them. | |
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