Tractor-drawn camote harvester developed

A tractor-drawn sweetpotato harvester has been developed.

The farm device was designed by the Leyte State University-Philippine Root Crop Research and Training Center (LSU-PRCRTC) based in Baybay, Leyte, in collaboration with UP Los Baños.

Monitored by the Los Baños-based Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCARRD), the project was funded by the Department of Agriculture-Bureau of Agricultural Research (DA-BAR).

It will but a matter of time before the equipment is perfected and offered to the sweetpotato industry, this writer was told by Dr. Paciencia Po-Milan, LSU’s first lady president, and Dr. Jose Bacusmo, director of the LSV-based Visayas Consortium for Agriculture and Resources Program (VICARP), one of the 14 PCARRD-coordinated government regional R&D consortia.

The project addressed the development of a functional sweetpotato harvester that is critically needed by the industry.

Sweetpotato is primarily used in making starch. Sweetpotato starch factories are found mostly in Eastern Visayas, Central Luzon, and Pangasinan. Most of these factories are facing the problem of high cost of harvesting.

Most of the sweetpotato farms in the three regions supply the needs of urban centers such as Metro Manila and Cebu. The industry continues to expand in view of the increasing needs of the country’s food and feed industries.

The current manual harvesting practice consumes 13 to 25 percent of the total cost of production.

To reduce the harvesting cost, A.B. Loreto and M.B. Loreto Jr. of LSU conducted a study on the development of a tractor-drawn sweetpotato harvester. The equipment was designed, fabricated, and evaluated at LSU.

"Mechanized harvesting of sweetpotato roots will help reduce the production cost and possibly improve the timeliness of other farm operations," DA-BAR also said. – Rudy A. Fernandez