Aiming to address the challenges of poor soil clearance, high operational resistance, and elevated damage rates in ginger harvesting machines, the design and development of a shovel-screen combined ginger excavation and soil clearance device was introduced. The device primarily consisted of a digging shovel and a soil-shaking screen. Theoretical analysis and simulated experiments were conducted on the ginger excavation and soil clearance device, leading to the preliminary determination of a shovel face angle of 18°, a shovel face length of 160mm, and a swinging frequency of 4Hz. Field experiments on the ginger harvester were carried out based on the Box-Behnken experimental design principle, with forward speed, shaking screen swing amplitude, and shaking screen swing frequency as experimental factors, and ginger soil content and damage rate as experimental indicators. Variance analysis was performed on the experimental results, and regression models between ginger soil content, damage rate, and significant factors were established. The optimization of the regression model’s objective function yielded the optimal parameter combination as follows: forward speed of 0.39m/s, swing amplitude of 30°, and swing frequency of 3.901Hz, resulting in a predicted ginger soil content of 9.85% and a damage rate of 1.79%. Field validation experiments demonstrated that the average ginger soil content harvested by the ginger excavation and soil clearance device was 10.31%, with an average damage rate of 1.86%, both showing relative errors of less than 5% compared with the model’s predictions. Compared with the original ginger excavation and soil clearance device, the average ginger soil content harvested by the device was decreased by 2.39 percentage points, and the average damage rate was decreased by 1.38 percentage points. The operational resistance of the ginger excavation and soil clearance device was approximately 1240N, representing a reduction of about 11.43% compared with that of the original device.