Abstract
The garlic, along with the red pepper, is one of the major seasoning vegetables in Korea. Garlic clove planting is one of the most laborious operations. Labor cost is the main source of high production cost of the garlic. Because of the geometrical uniqueness and irregularity of garlic cloves, mechanization of garlic clove planting is very difficult. To overcome price competition against the imported garlic, however, there has been a need of development of a clove metering device and a planting device for the garlic clove planter. Computer simulation, laboratory tests and field tests were conducted to develop a garlic clove planter. This research was conducted to drop garlic cloves into a soil holes through a drum bucket metering system and a rotary type planting system. Followings are the major achievements from this study. 1. The metering device consisted of a drum, a guide, a bucket and a bucket cover. Opening positions of the metering hopper were evaluated at different positions and trajectories of planting hoppers. The simulation showed that the optimum positions of hopper was -15${\sim}$0 mm in the x direction. 2. When the planter was tested under different soil textures and water contents, the best performances were obtained in a upland field with 29.1% water content and a paddy field with 18.3% water content where single clove metering and missing rate were 88.4% and 1.3%, and 90.7% and 2.0%, respectively.
