DEVELOPMENT OF A WHEEL ACTUATED FOUR - ROW MANUAL RICE TRANSPLANTER
In order to solve the boredom of high labour demand and cost of transplanting operations during rice cultivation that shares 25 % of the total production cost (Kumbhar et al., 2017) as well as requiring the ranges from 50 - 60 man-days/ha. A wheel actuated four – row rice transplanter was developed to transplant washed root seedlings, the objectives of the study were to determine tsome physical properties of the seedlings, design, construct and evaluate the performance of the machine. The machine consists of the handle, seedlings trays, four bar linkage transplanting mechanism, wheel drive and the float. The results of the physical properties show that the average length, weight and stem diameter were 211 30 mm, 1.15 0.87 and 1.11 0.88 respectively. The performance evaluation of the rice transplanter revealed that The developed rice transplanter transplanted root washed type seedlings on 4 rows at 250 mm inter-row spacing. Effective field capacity and operating speed were 0.2 ha/h and 0.5 m/s respectively. Percentage missing hills, visible damage of the seedlings by the transplanter, floating hills and transplanting efficiency were 10 %,. 9 %, 8 % and 65 % rexpectively.