The field transplanting of vegetable seedlings offers many advantages over the direct sowing of vegetable seed including:

• Earlier crop establishment.
• More uniform crop growth
• Shorter grow times in the field, meaning that more crops can be sown in the same land in the one year.
• Saves on seed cost, particularly with expensive hybrid seed.
• Saves water requirements in the field
• Enables easier identification and control of disease in the nursery.

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To improve the quality of your field transplanting:

• Grow better seedlings . Of particular importance to transplanting is having a "hard" plant which can survive transplant shock, and also having a plant grown in a cell which is well suited to automatic planting and will not "squash".
• Have good ground preparation. In particular it is important to have your fields well drained, as good automatic planting in mud is difficult.
• Have accurate spacing of your plants. Plants which are too close to each other won't be as vigorous as they should be, when spacings are too large valuable land is lost. The Williames automatic transplanters have an encoder which can be used to give precise spacing in the field.
• Plant at exactly the right depth. This is particularly important for lettuce, where a good cell is also important, to avoid an oval shaped plant developing. The Williames G4 field transplanter gives precise depth control.
• Monitor and measure your performance. By monitoring the uniformity of harvest, yields per hectare, disease problems etc the quality of field transplanting can be improved by linking it back to the nursery. The Williames transplanters give you an exact count of how many plants are transplanted, and this can be compared with the number of trays supplied to calculate how many germinated plants had been supplied by the nursery. In addition you can also use the plant counter to determine how many plants have been put in any one field.