Development of Chain Conveyor-type Spinach Harvester

This study was conducted to solve the problem of spinach harvesting done by manpower at the outdoor field during the cold winter season. Prototype spinach harvester was designed to dig, pick-up, and collect in a continuous operation for harvesting outdoor field-planted crawling type spinach. In the field test, two types of blades (Type A : angle of $150^{\circ}$, Type B : straight) were used for measuring the cutting loads of spinach and chain conveyor with lugs was used for picking up the root cut spinach. Prototype's vibrating blade reduced the digging power of the fixed blade by $46\%$. The loss was also very little ($0.7\%$) with a digging depth of 4 cm, an oscillation frequency of 748 rpm, and an oscillation distance of 33 mm. The working performance of the prototype spinach harvester was 38 hour/ha resulting to $96\%$ labor cost reduction compared to the conventional harvesting.