DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ROTARY WEEDER CUMFERTILIZER DRILLRegatti Venkat, Basani Nagaraj, S Sai Mohan, Pramod Mohnot and Rajvir YadavAbstract To increase the energy use efficiency and reduce production cost in small landholding agriculture, it isquite necessary to have suitable combination implements which farmers can use and also allow them to usefor custom hiring. Intercultivation and fertilizer application are two important operations involved in cropproduction. Rotary weeder cum fertilizer drill was designed with an objective of timely weeding and effectivefertilizer application by considering soil and crop parameters. It performs both weeding and fertilizerapplication at a time in a single operation. It was fabricated for wider spaced crops like cotton, pigeon peaand castor. After the completion of fabrication, the machine was thoroughly evaluated and calibrated under laboratory conditions. The machine was evaluated in caster crop at different weeding stages to estimate theperformance of the machine. From the field tests field capacity, field efficiency, fuel consumption andweeding efficiency obtained were 0.196 ha/h, 86% and 1.35 l h-1 91.23% respectively. It was found that thedeveloped machine requires a very less amount of manual energy on comparing with existing mechanicalweeding and manual fertilizer application combinations. |