Manual planting of sugar-beet stecklings is a very laborious and time-consuming operation. 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 studied and the main field performance parameters of the machine were measured. The results showed that the transplanter was able to place the

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... ings with a row spacing of 65 cm and a plant spacing of 50.3 cm at a selected depth of 13 cm. Deviations of the steck-ling placements relative to their theoretical positions were 4.5 % and 3.6 % along the row and in a direction perpendicular to the row respectively. For a forward speed of 0.6 km/h and a maximum planting depth (18 cm), the required draft was 4.05 kN.