Research Regarding the Production of Eggplant Grafted Seedlings by Manual and Semi-automatic Grafting

Abstract

The research had aimed to establish the technology for obtaining the eggplant grafted seedlings by manual or mechanical with semi-automatic machine. The operations were performed manually and semi-automatic by the grafting robot installation GR-800CS.It was used as  scion “Luiza” cultivars and respectively, Aragon F1.The rootstocks used was Torvum vigor (Kaneko Seeds) and “Emperador” (Rijk Zwaan).The method for the obtaining of eggplant grafted seedlings - manually or mechanically - involves the following stages: sowing the graft, sowing the stock, preparation, and healing, transferring the grafts from the healing tunnel in the growing space. The method by a installation involves monitoring and execution of some relatively similar stages and operations with the ones presented within the manual method. The differences consist mainly in the preparation of the biological material for and the operation itself. It was determinate and established the operator’s yield dynamics in a day of work, the average number of grafted plants / day / operator and the average number of grafted plants realized by a single worker / hour. In order to reflect the economic efficiency was calculated and specified the cost price for grafted seedlings of eggplant, realized by method and respectively by manual or semi-automatic method. For manual of a1000 eggplants are required 24.02 days /man, while for of 1000 eggplants by semi-automatic methods are necessary only 9.27 days/ man. Was registered a decrease of the cost price for semi-automatic over 16.3% compared with manual grafting.