Alternate tillage and crop establishment methods for sustainable paddy cultivation
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Date
2017
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CCSHAU
Abstract
Rice (oryaza sativa L.) is one of the important cereal crops for food security in India, it is
cultivated on an area of about 45 mha, with a production of 90 mt. Conventional rice transplanting is
highly labour intensive. The problem is further intensified with timely unavailability of labour and
increasing labour wages. The potential solutions include a shift from intensive tillage to no tillage
and/or from manual transplanting to mechanical transplanting or dry direct–seeding of rice. Thus, this
study was undertaken to evaluate different tillage and crop establishment methods in paddy for their
effects on crop productivity, water use efficiency, energy and economics in rice cultivation. The
different treatments were direct seeded rice (DSR) both dry and vattar, transplanting by mechanical
transplanter in unpuddled condition (UN-MTR) and manual transplanting in puddle condition in both
laser and planker levelled field. Grain yield of UN-MTR was significantly (4 to11 per cent) higher than
all other treatments in both laser leveled and planker leveled field of the study. The unpuddled
mechanical transplanting condition consumes 2 per cent more water and DSR (dry and vattar)
consumes 2 to 4 per cent less water as compare to manual transplanting. DSR (dry and vattar) field
conditions required 3 per cent more labour and unpuddled mechanical transplanting field conditions
save 34 per cent labour in comparison to manual transplanting. The output: input energy obtained for
unpuddled mechanical transplanting (5.39) followed by manual transplanting (4.90), DSR dry (4.93),
and DSR vattar (4.78). In case of planker levelled field the output: input energy for unpuddled
mechanical transplanting was 5.30 followed by manual transplanting (4.98), DSR dry (4.88), and in
DSR vattar (4.69). The B:C ratio in unpuddled mechanical transplanting was 1.23 followed by manual
transplanting (1.09), DSR dry (1.05) and DSR vattar (1.03) in laser levelled field.
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