A transplanter incorporating a high speed plant setting mechanism and an automatic seedling supply system has been developed for plants grown in greenhouse trays. At 2.6 plants per second the plant setting mechanism was too fast for manual feeding so a plant supply was required. Plants from vertically positioned trays are removed one row at a time and laid on a conveyor which transports them to the plant setting mechanism. The trays are moved simultaneously with the supply conveyor during the plant transfer and then they are shuttled back, indexed down one row for the removal of the next row of plants. The horizontal plants received by the plant setting mechanism are reoriented and set vertically into the soil at zero relative velocity to the ground. The experimental transplanter has handled both artificial and live seedling plants at over 2.5 plants per second in the laboratory. The experimental machine needs to be field tested with a variety of crops and trees, redesigned for more economical manufacture, and developed through the prototype stage so it can be utilized by farmers. Since this transplanter is three or four times as fast as conventional machines, crop and tree planting will be faster and require less labor.Applications:There are an estimated four to seven billion crop and tree seedlings planted annually in North America. Greenhouse production of seedlings has been largely automated and more and more are being produced in the modular growing trays because of the higher quality and better survival after field setting. Field transplanting is still a very labor intensive and tedious operation. The development of an economical, automatic transplanting machine could broaden the use of transplanting allowing long season crops to be grown in areas with short growing seasons and bringing crops to earlier maturity when prices are usually better for farmers.
