Development and Evaluation of Manual Operated Two Row Planter for Onion Seeds

Abstract

Onion (Allium Cepa L.) is cultivated globally as a one of the prominent vegetable crop. India is the second largest producer of onion in the world next to China, but still there is large of scope to enhance the production and productivity. In India, the cultivation of onion is not fully mechanized, only progressive farmers are using the machineries for cultivation. Therefore, it’s required the intensive labour, resulted low productivity with high cost of cultivation. Generally farmers are doing the manual sowing of seeds or manual transplanting system. To address this issue, a manual operated two row planter was developed for directly sowing the seed in prepared field. This machine can easily be operated by a single man/woman by pushing action while walking in the field. Evaluation of the machine was successfully performed in enclosed environment (i.e. laboratory) and on the grounds of some performance parameters that plays a crucial role in performance evaluation of machine. The parameters such as missing index, multiple index and quality of feed index were determined respectively that yielded numerical values of 11.5 per cent, 25 per cent and 63 per cent, respectively. On the basis of obtained results, it was easily justified that metering mechanism of vertical rotor type with dimensions of slot size 2.5 mm × 3 mm was most suitable for mechanical sowing of onion seeds having an operational speed of 2 km h-1 to obtain the optimum seed rate of 7-8 kg ha-1. The field capacity and field efficiency of the developed machine for sowing of onion seeds were found to be 0.042 ha h-1and 78 per cent respectively at the average operational speed of 1.8 km h-1. But as far as the labour requirement is compared, in instance of the onion planter, only 48 man-h are required for planting of 1 ha area, whereas in case of manual transplanting method, about 800-960 man-h are required for 1 ha area. The developed machine results in savings in terms of seed, labour requirement, inputs i.e. fertilizers, chemicals, water etc. by providing 15 cm of row to row spacing uniformly with an addition of 10 cm plant to plant spacing. Uniform crop establishment also enhance the mechanization of subsequent operations i.e. weeding, spraying and harvesting. The yield obtained by developed seed drill was 14.9 t ha-1which is very close to the yield obtained with manual transplanting of onion seedlings i.e. 15.6 t ha-1.