THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOMATIC TRANSPLANTERS

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.

Symposium on the Timing of Field vegetable Production

W. Boa

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.1978.72.16