Abstract: A machine for automatically removing soil plugs from the densely packed configuration of their growing tray and presenting them serially in a reliable and precisely positioned manner to appropriate plug takeup portions of an automated plug handling system. Broadly, the plug loader and feeder according to the present invention comprises a reciprocating plug ejection mechanism operable to remove a complete row of plugs from the tray, a tray indexing mechanism for incrementally moving the tray, one row at a time, past the plug ejection mechanism, and a carousel feeder which acts first as a receiving station and then as a plug presenting system. The machine further comprises a synchronous drive mechanism for taking motion from any appropriate input drive and generating the timed motions of the above-mentioned components over each machine cycle.