Re-design, fabrication, and performance evaluation of manual conical drum seeder: A case study

Rice cultivation is basically carried out by means of transplanting or direct sowing (DS). Although transplanting methods tend to give higher yields, the cost of operation is significantly higher in relation to DS methods. Hence, to date, most famers in the Third World countries use manual broadcasting (MB) due to its economic viability. Manual broadcasting is direct sowing of pre-germinated paddy rice (DSPPR) by hand, based on personnel skill, on wet puddled soils. A major drawback of this method is that the distribution of pre-germinated paddy rice (PPR) is not uniform on the wet puddled soil, which results in a lower yield. Although the mechanization of DS has been achieved via manually operated mechanical drum seeders to overcome this challenge, these have their own inherent drawbacks. The present work was undertaken to re-design and develop a manually operated mechanical drum seeder, which can be used for sowing PPR, by taking into consideration currently available drum seeder designs and their drawbacks. The performance of the new design conical drum seeder (CDS) in the paddy fields was evaluated in relation to MB. The theoretical and effective field capacity, field efficiency, and missing hill percentage were observed to be 0.22 ha/h, 0.18 ha/h, 81% and 3.70%, respectively. The saving of PPR seed was about 75% and increase in yield was about 37% in CDS as compared to MB. © 2013 American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers ISSN 0883-8542.