Vol. 12, Special Issue 11 (2023)

Author(s):
Sachin Gajendra and KB Tiwari

Abstract:
Indian agriculture produces about 800 million tonnes of crop residues annually. The main purpose of straw management in harvested field through farm machinery is to reduce the burning of crop residues such as wheat stubble. This can have negative impacts on air quality, productivity of soil resources, loss of nutrients, pollution from smoke and increased carbon dioxide in the environment. The alternate methods to reduce the residue burning and management of large quantity of straw are use of farm machinery such as straw chopper, disc harrow, rotavator and happy seeder. The different combinations of these machinery were tested in the field. In this experiment, six treatments, i.e., T₁ (straw chopper), T₂ (disc harrow), T₃ (rotavator), T₄ (happy seeder), T₅ (straw chopper followed by disc harrow) and T₆ (disc harrow followed by rotavator) were taken with four replications for each treatment. The average straw height before the operation of all treatments was 30.2 cm and after the operation was 6.35, 8.28, 7.81, 7.04, 5.71 and 6.05 cm for treatments T₁, T₂, T₃, T₄, T₅ and T₆, respectively. The minimum straw height was measured in treatment T₅ and the maximum height was measured in treatment T₂.