Development of Small-Sized Cabbage Harvesting Equipment for Smallholder Farmers

Abstract

As one of the most important edible vegetables in China, cabbage is mostly grown by smallholder farmers. At present, cabbage harvesting typically involves two methods: manual harvesting and large-scale cabbage harvesting equipment. The former is inefficient and labor-intensive, while the latter is highly efficient but expensive, offering extremely low cost-performance for smallholder farmers. The market lacks low-cost and effective cabbage harvesting equipment tailored for smallholder farmers. Through investigating and analyzing the process of manual cabbage harvesting by farmers, a small-sized cabbage harvesting equipment has been designed. The equipment incorporates a cabbage maturity sensing mechanism with a multi-link structure, which uses the volume of cabbage as the criterion for determining maturity. Meanwhile, the mechanism for removing outer leaves simulates the technical process of farmers selectively removing large outer leaves of Chinese cabbage during the picking process. This harvesting equipment has been put into practice and is being batch-trialed in cooperation with local farmers. Compared with existing large-scale cabbage harvesting equipment, the cost of this equipment is reduced by approximately 1/8. Compared with manual harvesting, its harvesting efficiency is increased by at least 1.8 times.