Vol. 12, Special Issue 10 (2023)

Author(s):
M Arivazhagan, C Harisudan, R Baskaran, AP Mohankumar and K Bharathi Kumar

Abstract:
Groundnut is a labour-intensive crop, especially in traditional method of groundnut cultivation, a greater number of labour force is required for operations like sowing, weeding and harvesting. Thus, results in high cost of cultivation and high energy usage. Increasing energy use efficiency and reducing cost of cultivation in groundnut cultivation is challenging one. Mechanized groundnut cultivation is pre-requisite to replace the high labour-intensive traditional method of groundnut cultivation. In India, very few research has been done in the energetics of mechanized groundnut production. Thus, a field study was carried to work-out the energy requirements for groundnut production under mechanized sowing, weeding and harvesting using energy equivalents in order to view and identify the suitable implement package with high energy efficiency and profitability to the farmers. The results highlight that a total input energy of 13109 MJ/ha was required by the conventional method of cultivation whereas in improved mechanization method required a total input energy of 11515 MJ/ha is required. The groundnut mechanization package involves, use of improved implements consisting of hand push seeder for sowing, power weeder for weeding, groundnut digger for harvesting and power operated stripper for pod stripping which results in higher energy ratio of 12.86 compared to conventional method of cultivation consisting of manual sowing, hand weeding, pullout and pod stripping manually results in lower energy ratio of 9.79.