Drilling pre germinated paddy on puddle land saver labour and yield more
Answers
Direct seeding and transplanting are the two methods of planting rice. The rice farmers
practicing transplanting are facing problems like shortage of labour during peak time, hike
in labour charges, small and fragmented land holdings etc. Direct seeding is becoming
increasingly popular now days in India. The wet seeding of rice was adopted. Sprouted
seeds were sown in puddle field 1-2 days after puddling using perforated drum seeder.
Eight row direct paddy drum seeder tested manually drawn was used. The laboratory
calibration was carried out with different combinations of drum fill level viz., full, half,
quarter, and travel speed viz., 1 km/h, 1.5 km/h and 2 km/h. From the laboratory
calibration test the combination of half drum fill level and 1 km/h speed were selected for
field evaluation of drum seeder. The drum seeder was tested on puddle field. It was found
from the study that, the theoretical field capacity was found 0.16 ha/h, while effective field
capacity of the drum seeder was observed 0.131 ha/h. The field efficiency of the seeder
was found 82.08 percent. The number of seeds dropped per hill was 5. The hill to hill
spacing was 14.5 cm. The number of hills per square m was 30. The hill missing was 5.8
percent. The cost of operation of drum seeding is Rs. 42.67 per hour and Rs. 341.36 per ha.
Seed rate was nearly constant for initial 10 m distance travelled. For the next successive
points i.e. up to 20 m distance t