Vol. 12, Issue 10 (2023)

Author(s):
Devesh Kumar, Yalaka Andini and Sheen C Moses

Abstract:
Maize cultivation gets popularity now a day in our country because of multifarious use of maize in human food and especially in the poultry industries. Maize is cultivated manually which is time consuming, labor intensive and costly. A low cost manually operated push type maize planter was designed and the planter consists of two supportive wheels behind the planter, a seed hopper, a vertical plate type seed metering device, a seed tube, a pair of bed former and handle. Power was transmitted from the ground wheels to the metering device through gear. Maize Seeds were used to test the planter. The seed planter was calibrated in the workshop of the department of Farm Machinery and Power Engineers to maintain the desired seed rate and seed rate was calculated as 20 kg/ha. In the field test the effective field capacity, field efficiency, and draft were calculated in three forward speed levels at 1.0 km/h, 1.5 km/h and 2 km/h as 2 ha/h, 62.51%, 35 kgf; 3.05 ha/h, 67.91%, 25.60 kgf and 4.5 ha/h, 75.49%, 17.5 kgf for area 100 m². The best performance of the maize planter was found at a 2 km/ha as a highest effective capacity, field efficiency and lower draft among them.