Transportation and Elevation System for Greenhouse Crops

A closed loop transportation and elevation system for greenhouse crop production benches was designed and tested. Its purpose was to improve access to tomato plants in production. The system met two major design criteria: (1) benches could be elevated, and (2) benches could be interchanged between any two rows within a greenhouse bay. The system consisted of aluminum transportable benches, a pipe track system, transfer-elevation device (TED), and two rear transfer mechanisms (RTM). The centralized work station within the bench transport system, provided the possibility of performing labor studies to evaluate the system/labor interactive performance of the overall production process. The relative comparison of the operation times required for each operation for an elevated versus a non-elevated bench was evaluated and a measure of the relative bench transport time was determined.