Journal of Bio-Environment Control ISSN:1229-4675(Print) 2765-3641(Online) 생물환경조절학회지

This study was conducted to determine the optimal working conditions when a recently developed blower-type onion stem cutter is utilized for cutting onion leaves at harvest time. The June 20 leaf cutting treatment group had the highest leaf dryness among the treatment groups (leaf dryness: 66.3%; leaf moisture content: 50.5%); the residual leaf length was 6.7 ± 3.5 cm. It is considered to have the best mechanical leaf cutting performance among the treatment groups because it is included in the optimal range of 4–10 cm. The average working speed of mechanical onion leaf cutting using the stem cutter was 0.17 m·s^-1, which is approximately 3.4 times faster than the average working speed of 0.05 m·s^-1 in the human leaf cutting treatment group. This is expected to save approximately 2.6 hours compared to human labor (based on one person) when working on a 10a area using this machine. In addition, the incidence of damaged bulbs in the machine leaf cutting treatment group was 1.3%, compared to 0.0% in the manual leaf cutting treatment group. This suggests that the mechanical leaf cutting treatment group had a higher average onion bulb decay rate during storage than the manual leaf cutting treatment group. When the storage characteristics of each treatment group were examined, the decay rate by bulb part (leaf connected or root connected) after 8 months of storage was higher in the treatment group with a residual leaf length of less than 5.0 cm after mechanical leaf cutting than in the treatment with a residual leaf length of more than 5.0 cm. This is thought to be due to the fact that treatments with a residual leaf length of less than 5.0 cm are more susceptible to infection by pathogens that cause decay during storage than treatments with a residual leaf length of 5.0 cm or more. Based on the results of this experiment, performance target of the experimental machine (residual leaf length after operation: 5 cm), and existing research on the optimal residual leaf length for onion harvesting, it is recommended to cut onion leaves so that the residual leaf length is 5–10 cm when using the stem cutter.