Recent Research Progress on Key Technologies and Equipment for Mechanized Potato Harvesting

Potato is an important food crop in China, and its planting area and output rank first in the world. Due to the labor intensity and low efficiency of manual harvesting, mechanized harvesting has become an inevitable solution for the development of the potato industry. In this paper, on the basis of elaborating on mechanized harvesting operation modes for potatoes, the research progress of key technologies, such as top-killing potato seedlings, low-loss digging with reduced obstruction, limiting the depths of rows, high-efficiency separation, sorting tons of packages, and intelligent harvesting in China and abroad, is analyzed. By comparing the basic structure and technical characteristics of both domestic mechanized potato-harvesting equipment and that used abroad, this paper identifies the gaps between domestic equipment’s performance, intelligence level, and adaptability and those of equipment in European and American countries and also identifies bottlenecks, such as large regional variability, the lack of high-efficiency and low-loss separating devices, and the difficulty of breaking through key “chokepoint” technologies. On this basis, this paper proposes that the future development direction of domestic mechanized potato harvesting should focus on the synergistic development of multiple modes, on the research and development of flexible and low-loss separation equipment, and on the integration of intelligent technology; it also gives specific suggestions, aiming to provide references for the future progress of mechanized potato harvesting.