Peanut is a significant oil crop and cash crop worldwide, known for its high quality and international competitiveness. It is also a crucial agricultural product exported by many countries, including ours. Peanut cultivation is prevalent in Africa, Asia, and South America. In our country, peanut is grown in almost all provinces, except for Qinghai. In 2010, the planting area and yield of peanuts set a record, with a planting area of 4666.7Khm, accounting for 20% of the total planting area worldwide and ranking second globally. The production was 15000Kt, accounting for 35% of the world’s total production and ranking first globally.

However, peanut harvesting is a labor-intensive process that varies with the season. Due to low efficiency, significant losses during harvest, and time-consuming farming practices, the development of peanut processing relies heavily on mature machinery technology. Unfortunately, peanut machinery has developed slowly in our country for a long time, hindering the growth of the peanut industry.

In recent years, the shortage of rural labor has become more prominent due to the fast pace of urbanization and industrialization. As a result, society urgently requires the development of peanut mechanization. To address this issue, it is essential to keep up with the development process and new information regarding peanut machinery both domestically and abroad. Doing so will have significant guiding significance for the development of peanut mechanization in our country.

1, Mechanized Harvesting of Peanuts

Peanut cultivation has come a long way from traditional manual harvesting methods. Today, modern agricultural practices have introduced mechanized harvesting techniques that offer increased efficiency, reduced labor requirements, and enhanced product quality. The mechanization of peanut harvesting can be broadly classified into two main methods: mechanized sublevel harvest and mechanized combine harvest. These techniques involve the use of various equipment at different stages of the peanut harvesting process, revolutionizing the industry.

Mechanized Sublevel Harvest

Mechanized sublevel harvest involves completing different stages of peanut cultivation using specialized machinery. This approach enhances efficiency by minimizing manual labor and streamlining operations. The mechanized sublevel harvest process utilizes several key pieces of equipment:

Mining Plough: The process begins with the use of a mining plough, which digs up the peanuts and removes the surrounding earth. This prepares the plants for further processing.

Mining (Harvest) Machine: The mining machine is employed to unearth the peanuts, separating them from the soil. This ensures minimal damage to the peanuts during extraction.

Fruit Picking Machine: After extraction, a fruit picking machine is employed to collect the peanuts from the field. This automated process prevents damage to the pods and streamlines the harvesting operation.

Harvesting Machine and Picking Harvester: These machines are crucial for the final stages of the mechanized sublevel harvest. They assist in picking, separating, clearing, and screening the peanuts. Once sorted, the peanuts are collected and stored in designated containers, ready for further processing.

Typical Models of Mechanical Harvest

There are three prominent models of mechanical peanut harvesting that have gained traction in the industry:

Two-Stage Harvest Method: This approach, often associated with American peanut harvesting, involves two main stages. Initially, a mining machine extracts the peanuts, inverting the plants so that the pods are on the surface while the peanut vines remain below. As the peanuts dry, the machine turns the vines to accelerate the drying process. When the peanut pods reach a moisture content of around 20%, a combined peanut harvester equipped with a picking machine is deployed. This machine efficiently separates the pods from the vines, performs quality checks, and deposits the collected peanuts into storage.

Single-Stage Harvest with Manual Picking: In this method, the mining machine is responsible for unearthing the peanuts and spreading them across the field. Workers then manually collect the peanuts and move them to a sunning area for drying. Once the peanuts achieve the desired moisture content, a fruit picking machine is used to collect the pods. Subsequent screening and processing lead to storage-ready peanuts.

Direct Worker-Aided Harvesting: This technique involves using a harvester to dig up the peanuts and remove the surrounding earth. The peanuts are then spread across the field, where workers manually pick them up. Additionally, fruit picking machines can be employed to collect peanuts from the field and surrounding areas. The harvested peanuts can be used for various purposes, including producing salted boiled peanut snacks after proper cleaning and screening.

Advantages and Future Implications

Mechanized peanut harvesting methods offer numerous advantages over traditional manual methods. These include increased efficiency, reduced labor demands, minimized damage to the peanuts, and enhanced product quality. Additionally, mechanization allows for better control over the harvesting process and increased consistency in the final product.

As technology continues to advance, the future of peanut harvesting holds promise. Innovations in automation, precision agriculture, and data-driven techniques could further optimize peanut cultivation and harvesting. By harnessing the power of technology, the agricultural industry can continue to meet growing demand while maintaining sustainability and quality standards.

2. Typical peanut harvesting machine of developed country

The developed country like American has researched the peanut machinery from long time ago, especially the technology research of the two stages harvesting is much mature. The American has began to research the peanut harvest from 19 the century. And now, American has the global advanced peanut harvest technology. In our country, the peanut harvester machinery was researched from 60s of twenties century. From the end of 70s to the beginning of 80s of twenties century, on the basis of imported American HOBBS622 peanut digger, our peanut harvest has developed though the beginning is much later. From the recent 50 years, many types of peanut harvest machinery have been researched. Those machines greatly changed the backward situation of peanut harvest in our country and realized the progressive development of peanut machine from zero to exist, from exist to good. But in general, our countries’ technology of peanut machine equipment has evident distance with developed country no matter any kinds of grain crops like wheat and rice. The Chinese farms has urgent request for new-model, high efficiency and high adaptability peanut harvest machine. So the research for the high reliability, high adaptability and economic good peanut harvest equipment is an urgent tusk for development of peanut mechanization.

The peanut combined harvester is now at the demonstration stage. Now there are experiment and producing demonstration sites in 8 provinces, including Henan province, Jiangsu province, Sichuang province, Liaoning province, etc. The total technology is up to the international advanced level.

3. Thinking of peanut harvest mechanization in our country

It is the effective way to adjust our country’s agriculture structure and increase the farmer’s income to develop the production mechanizing of fruit under the soil. Now, our country’s peanut harvest mainly depends on workers with heavy labor force and low production efficiency. As the agriculture structure adjustment, policy support to agriculture industry, decreasing of labor force and the advancement of biological technology, we have enter into a fast growing period of peanut machine. Various types and new production come to the market continuously and the effect is evident with constant field test. On the basis of our country’s production, we should stick to several principles in the light of peanut mechanization in our country.

1). Sticking to the principle of integrating the Sublevel harvesting machinery with the combine harvester. Peanut plant area is wide in our country which is almost covered each provinces in our country. But there is big difference among different provinces; most of them are in Henan province, Shandong province and Hebei province which account for half of the total output in our country. Therefore, many areas are planted with peanut in large area in the flat terrain. These areas are fit for operation of high speed combined harvesters. While in South areas of china, the fields are small in area with separating field and complicated terrain, many of them are planted in the hilly area. These areas are not fit for working of larger scale peanut harvester. As for this area, the easy and simple peanut digger and fruit picking machine are fit for harvest in separate stages which are more adapt to the farmers economic situation and farmers request.

2). Stick to research the peanut harvest equipment with high adaptability, strong generality and high reliability. At present, more and more foreign peanut harvesting machinery developed toward intelligent, efficient and humanistic etc. and our country is far behind foreign country in the aspect of peanut harvesting machinery. Now the existing peanut machinery in our country is unreasonable in structure and low in technology. It is evident that bad quality is not reliable, which greatly restricted the development of our peanut machinery. As the increasing of our country’s comprehensive national strength, the adjustment of industry policy, big investment to the scientific research, China’s peanut harvesting machinery and equipment is on the way to large-scale and electromechanical development direction. To research the peanut machinery with good versatility, strong adaptability, cost-effective and high degree of integration working is the main direction for peanut mechanization in China.

3). The integration of agriculture and machinery is the only way to the development of peanut machinery. Mechanized harvesting crop is on the basis of scale and standardization production, and this has higher request to ways of planting peanut. But at present our country’s peanut growing is diversified with distribution. The planting situations in many areas are not suitable for combined harvesting. Therefore, to effectively promote the development of mechanized harvesting peanuts, it must be combined with the agricultural machinery. Peanut research department and peanut plant areas have to set up the relevant mechanisms, to ensure the standardization and normalization of planting, to lay the foundation for the peanut mechanized harvesting.

Peanut is our country’s important oil crop which has big international competiveness. Under the background of modern agriculture that eatable oil depend on import the materials and the changing production method, our country’s peanut industry not only be pregnant with develop opportunity but also face with the challenges. The backward development of peanut machinery has become the bottleneck of restricting the peanut industry. It is the hot point and important tusk to increase the peanut mechanization in the new era.

Peanut machinery for harvesting is now at the primary stages for development in our country. There is a long way to go for peanut machinery. But we believe that peanut industry is trying hard to the process from producing, learning and researching combined, cooperated, under the practical request and government policy, our country is bound to be on the healthy way of developing peanut machine technology.