Performance Evaluation of Wet Land Power Weeder for Paddy
Keshavalu . *
College of Agricultural Engineering, Raichur, India.
B. Prasan Patil
College of Agricultural Engineering, Raichur, India.
V. Raghavendra
College of Agricultural Engineering, Raichur, India.
Shafat Khan
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Weeding now a day’s necessitates the introduction of suitable power weeders for paddy cultivation. A study was conducted at Farmers field with power weeder. The geometry of crop used was 60×10 cm and the performance of power weeder was compared with conventional method of hand weeding. The working width of the power weeder was 15 cm. The data collected were analyzed and the major findings of the field evaluation for actual field capacity of manual weeding and power weeder observed was 0.005 ha/hr and 0.15 ha/hr, respectively. The maximum value of weeding index of 99 percent was observed in case of weeding operation by manual method compared to that of power weeder (93.7 percent). The plant damage of power weeder and manual weeder was observed as 8 and 2 percent, respectively. The savings in cost of weeding operation using power weeder when compared to manual weeding was 63.62 percent.
Keywords: Power weeder and wet land weeder.