Development of Harvesting Technology for Spinach (Part 1)

Development of Prototype Harvester and its Performance

Abstract

The destination of this research is to develop a harvesting technology for fragile leaf greens, such as spinaches, which don't head up. This paper presents a manufactured prototype harvester and its performance. The prototype harvester is a walking type one harvesting a row of leaf greens. It consists of the digging collector department, conveyance department, storage department and traveling department that is a gate style carrier with 4 wheels. It was able to harvest spinach that grew outdoors with 5 rows seeding in a ridge, each row had 15cm separation to another, at 0.2m/s traveling speed. The damaged leaf ratio, that was measured by the number of leaves and stems damaged in harvesting, was 25% just after harvesting and was 13% after preparation removing incomplete leaves.