PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A PNEUMATIC ONION SEEDER AND ITS COMPARISON WITH MANUAL TRANSPLANTING METHOD 1809
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Date
2013-11
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JAU, JUNAGADH
Abstract
The onion {Allium cepa L.) is one of the important commercial vegetable crops
grown on a large area in India for local consumption as well as export purpose. India is a
second major onion producing country in the world has a productivity of 10.19 MT/ha
only. Onion growers are facing lot of problems in transplanting of onion seedlings with
the shortage of farm labours during transplanting season. Transplanting method is
tedious, causing fatigue and backache due to the longer hours required for transplanting.
In direct sowing, non uniform distribution of seeds and requirement of seed rate is more
which not only increase the cost of seeds but also need to thinning operation. Considering
the labour problems, high cost of cultivation and non availability of a good machine, an
imported pneumatic vegetable seeder was tested at three speeds (1.56, 2.47 and 4.20
km/h) to find out it's suitability for direct sowing of onion seeds at JAU, Junagadh.
The physical properties of onion seed of GWO-1 variety in teirns of equivalent
diameter, sphericity, bulk density, angle of repose and thousand seed weight were
observed as 0.19 cm, 0.69, 0.46 g/cc, 31.36° and 4.20 g respectively. The seeder was
tested for its quality parameters, power requirements, energy requirement, wheel slip, fuel
consumption and field efficiency, and then compared economically with the manual
transplanting method. The overall best results were obtained at the speed of 4.20 km/h
The best results of the machine for seed miss index (16.18%), seed multiple index
(5.59%), quality of feed index (78.22%) and variability in spacing (10.09%) were
obtained. The plant population per sq. m and germination percentage was observed as
51.50 and 85.44% respectively. The wheel slip, fuel consumption, power requirement
energy requirement and field efficiency of the seeder was found as 10.47%, 5.04 1/h'
18.81 kW, 50.11 MJ/ha and 66.75% respectively at the speed of 4.20 km/h.
The total cost of direct sowing of seed by the machine was ^ 4,322/ha and the total
cost of manual transplanting was ? 21,956/ha. The saving in cost of operation in direct
sowing by the seeder over manual transplanting was found to be ^ 14,457/ha.
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Keywords
FARM MACHINERY AND POWER ENGINEERING