Aiming at the high requirements of seed quality for sugarcane transversal planting, a combined furrow opener for transversal planting of sugarcane was designed based on the formation conditions of effective seeding space. The furrow opener designed included leak-proof plough, rotary tillage unit and furrow plough. The influencing factors of seeding effect and structural parameters were confirmed via analysis of seeding and soil movement law. Rotary tillage speed, working depth, and forward speed were used as factors, and the effective seeding depth, energy consumption of rotary tillage, and furrowing resistance were employed as indexes. The influence rules of working parameters on the furrow opener performance were studied by a three-factor and three-level field orthogonal experimental design. Results showed that working depth significantly influenced the effective seeding depth, energy consumption of rotary tillage, and furrowing resistance. Moreover, rotary tillage speed significantly influenced the energy consumption of rotary tillage, whereas forward speed significantly affected the energy consumption of rotary tillage. Thus, the influence of the working depth and rotary tillage speed was extremely significant, but that of forward speed was generally significant. The better parameters were obtained with the rotary tillage speed of 200r/min, the working depth of 30cm, and the forward speed of 1.20m/s. The field verification experiment results with better parameters showed that the effective seeding depth was 29.9cm, the stability of seeding depth was 97.6%, the thickness of covering soil was 8.8cm, the thickness of regolith was 3.4cm, the energy consumption of rotary tillage was 34.0kW, and the unilateral furrowing resistance was 14.1kN. The indicators could meet the requirements of sugarcane transversal planting.