K. Kazmeinkhah - Agricultural Research Center, East Azarbaijan, Tabriz, Islamic Republic of Iran.

Manual planting of sugar-beet stecklings is a very laborious and time-consuming opera-tion. To overcome the problems, and decrease the cost of operation to a reasonable level, a semi-automatic steckling transplanter was designed. The suitability of the steckling trans-planter with regard to the agrotechnical requirements of sugar-beet stecklings was stud-ied and the main field performance parameters of the machine were measured. The re-sults showed that the transplanter was able to place the stecklings with a row spacing of ۶۵ cm and a plant spacing of ۵۰.۳ cm at a selected depth of ۱۳ cm. Deviations of the steck-ling placements relative to their theoretical positions were ۴.۵ % and ۳.۶ % along the row and in a direction perpendicular to the row respectively. For a forward speed of ۰.۶ km/h and a maximum planting depth (۱۸ cm), the required draft was ۴.۰۵ kN.

Semi-automatic, Steckling, Sugar-beet, Transplanter