Abstract
This study was conducted to solve the problem of crawled spinach harvesting that had been mainly done by manpower on the outdoor fields during the winter season. Moreover, there are not enough workers available for farming at most of rural areas in Korea because farming is getting hard and the number of old-aged workers is increasing. In order to find appropriate methods of digging, picking and collecting of spinach, the tests were examined outdoors. A prototype was designed based on the results of the tests and then fabricated for digging, picking-up and then collecting in continuous operation for harvesting spinach planted in the outdoor fields. In the field test with the prototype, the vibration intensity transmitted to the driver by vibrating blade was low while the vibrating blade reduced digging power by $46\%$ compared to that of the fixed blade. The spinach loss was found to be as low as $0.7\%$ in the condition of digging depth of 40 mm, cam rotational velocity of 748 rpm, and blade amplitude of 16.5 m. The working performance of the prototype spinach harvester was found to be 3.8 hour/10a resulting in $96\%$ of labor saving and $85\%$ of operating cost compared to the conventional manual harvesting.
