TESTING AND EVALUATION OF TRACTOR DRAWN SEMI-AUTOMATIC RHIZOME PLANTER

Abstract

Spices play an important role in Indian cuisine since long time. Turmeric has been used as a medicine, a condiment, and a dye since at least 600 B.C., while ginger has been used extensively throughout history for its medicinal purposes. These crops provide excellent opportunities in raising the income of farmers. This also provides higher productivity and offers great scope for value addition. However, manual planting of ginger and turmeric consumes more time and labour. To overcome this problem, a tractor drawn semi-automatic rhizome planter was developed by Er. Madhukumara DM under the guidance of Dr. Manoj Mathew at KCAET Tavanur. The present study was undertaken for testing and evaluating the performance of the tractor drawn semi-automatic planter. The planter was field tested for different combinations of forward speed and transmission ratios. The selected forward speeds of the tractor were 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 km hr -1 . A combination of forward speeds with two transmission ratios viz., 1:1.33 and 1:2 were taken for testing. The performance evaluation was conducted for turmeric rhizome in a field of 0.075 ha. Performance indices such as miss index (M), rhizome multiple index (DI), quality of feed index (A), precision index (I p ) and rhizome spacing (S) were used to evaluate performance of rhizome planter. The mean spacing for turmeric was ranged from 19.67 to 33 cm. The miss index and multiple index ranged from 4.34 % to 6.34 % and 2.34 % to 8.34 % respectively. Missing index and multiple index increases with increasing planter speed and increasing seed meter velocity. Quality of feed index was between 85.34 % and 93.34 % and the values of precision index was obtained in the range of 8 -13 % .The average field capacity and efficiency was 0.19 ha hr -1 and 83.69 %. The crop parameters and soil parameters were experimentally found during the test. The rhizome planter reduced the seed rate of turmeric setts to 1033.19 kg ha -1 and 688.79 kg ha -1 for rhizome spacing of 20 and 30 cm respectively. Based on the performance evaluation results, it is concluded that the tractor drawn semi-automatic rhizome planter is efficient at various conditions and can be subjected to further modifications at the seed metering disc so as to minimize the damage to the rhizome seeds.