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Flexibility, accuracy and speed are the main areas where the latest equipment is improving on older models, Sally Drury finds
Nursery machinery continues to develop to match the needs of the industry. New models tend to be more flexible, more accurate and faster than the ones they replace - witness the Visser transplanter displayed by Royal Brinkman at this year's Four Oaks Trade Show held in Cheshire in September.
Dutch company Visser has been building horticultural machinery and complete production lines since 1967 and its Pic-O-Mat GR2700 has 24 servo-driven grippers capable of transplanting up to 35,000 plants per hour - how many people would you need for that on a manual line?
The latest Visser transplanter, the Pic-O-Mat Vision, enables transplanting even when the source tray contains less than perfect plants. This model is equipped with a new type of gripper that makes it possible to form a picture of the plant when it is held in the gripper With the Vision system, it can then determine whether or not the plant meets the required quality. Below-standard plants and/or empty plugs are thrown away and only good-quality ones are planted into the destination packs.
Sophisticated computer
The TEA CUBE2 600N series transplanter is a new development of the XP Series offered by Buckinghamshire-based Hamilton Design, a company well known for its seeding machines, which it sells into more than 60 countries around the world. The transplanter can be constructed with three-to-10 heads, each capable of being independently controlled by a sophisticated yet easy-to-use computer.
Typically, a four-head machine will transplant at a rate in excess of 6,500 plants/hour depending on application, rising to 10,000 plants/hour for a six-headed machine. This means two operators can keep up with production, one loading trays and labelling packs and the other unloading and patching the occasional miss.
Similarly, the latest potting machines also have benefits over their predecessors. Many of the latest models are capable of potting into a wider range of pot sizes and into bigger pots - useful because landscapers are demanding larger shrubs (Horticulture Week, September 2017). Some even facilitate the potting of bare-root subjects (see our review of the Javo Plus M2.0 on p59).
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