Technological features and elements of economic efficiency regarding the semi-automatic grafting of vegetables

Worldwide, more than 80% of vegetable grafting is performed manually. Over the last 10 years semi-automatic and automatic mechanical devices have been developed for grafting vegetable seedlings. In this study the grafting operations were performed manually and semi-automatically by the “grafting robot”: GR-800CS. The experiment was conducted using eggplants; the eggplants scions were 'Sharapova F₁' (Rijk Zwaan) and 'Aragon F₁' (Hazera Genetics), and the rootstocks used were 'Emperador' (Rijk Zwwan) and 'Hykiaku' (Kaneko Seeds). The difficulty consists mainly in preparing the biological material for grafting and the grafting operation itself. The operator's dynamic yield in a working day was determined, which included, the average number of grafted plants day^-1 operator^-1, the average number of grafted plants by a worker h^-1 and the specific costs for the grafting operation by both manual and semi-automatic methods. The manual grafting of 1000 pieces of eggplant required 2.4 working days worker^-1, while the grafting the same number by the semi-automatic method needed only 0.7 working days worker^-1. The semi-automatic method resulted in a 16.08% decrease of the price of seedlings compared with the manual method.