Design, Development and Testing of a Tractor Drawn Semi-Automatic Rhizome Planter for Ginger and Turmeric

Abstract

Ginger (Zingiber Officinale Roscoe) and Turmeric (Curcuma longa L.) are the oldest rhizome crops widely cultivated in India. These crops provide excellent opportunities in raising the income of farmers. This also provides higher productivity and offers great scope for value addition. At present, it is observed that the farmers in the state had faced problems in ginger and turmeric planting due to lack of labour shortage. Manual planting consumes more time and labour. Therefore, a mechanical rhizome planter is required for planting ginger and turmeric. Therefore, the present study was undertaken to design, develop and evaluate the performance of a rhizome planter for ginger and turmeric. A tractor drawn semi-automatic horizontal disc planter was developed and field tested. The rhizome planter was designed to suit various soil type and conditions to perform several functions simultaneously by opening the furrows, application of manure and planting of rhizomes and covering of rhizomes by soil and forming ridges in single pass. The field evaluation of rhizome planter was tested for different forward speeds and transmission ratios. Performance indices such as missing index (I miss ), rhizome multiple index (I multi ), quality of feed index (I qf ), precision index (I p ) and rhizome spacing (I s ) were used to evaluate performance of rhizome planter. The mean spacing for ginger and turmeric was ranged from 21.66 to 32.63 cm and 20.53 to 31.13 cm respectively. The optimum performance for planting ginger and turmeric were at a forward speed of 0.97 km hr -1 and transmission ratio of 1:1.25. The average field capacity and efficiency was 0.14 ha hr -1 and 78.76%. The savings in cost and time for mechanical planting was about 59.52% and 96.57% compared to manure planting. Based on the performance evaluation results, it is concluded that the developed rhizome planter is economical and efficient for rhizome planting.