On Farm Evaluation and Verification of Mini Tractor Drawn Potato Planter

Abstract

Potatoes are a key staple food in Ethiopia.  This crop provides good potential for farmers to increase their revenue.  This also increases productivity and gives enough opportunities for value addition.  However, manual planting requires more time and labor.  To address this issue, a tractor-drawn automatic row planter was designed.  The prototype tiny tractor-drawn potato planter comprises a hopper, a cup seed-metering mechanism, a furrow opener, a ground wheel, and a furrow-covering device.  The potato planter's performance was tested in the laboratory, and field experiments were carried out to investigate the influence of planter forward speed and hopper filling level on several dependent metrics such as missing index, multiple index, precision index, and feed quality index. Additionally, the study found that mean seed spacing, multiple index, missing index, precision index, and quality of the feed index were all greatly impacted by operating speed. As forward velocities increased, the mean seed spacing value varied from 26.85 to 30.57 cm. The ranges of the multiple indexes and miss index were 9.65% to 16.70% and 10.75% to 22.70%, respectively. Greater cup velocity, which allows the seeds less time to fill the cups, can be the cause of a greater missing index value at higher speeds. The precision index value fell between 12.63 and 17.46%, while the quality of feed index ranged from 66.25 to 76%. At a forward speed of 1.5 km/h, the machine's mean effective field capacity and field efficiency were 0.151 ha/hr and 84.09%, respectively. It was revealed that the average depth of seed planting was 6.94 cm. Based on the performance evaluation results, it is concluded that the tractor drawn automatic potato planter is satisfactory and can be subjected to further modifications at the seed metering mechanism so as to increase field capacity and reduce operating cost of the machine by increasing the no. of rows and fertilizer application system should be incorporated.