Background:
In cotton crops, basal and topdressing of fertilizer are completely done by manual labor which is labor intensive, time-consuming, having low fertilizer use efficiency, non-uniform, etc. Few mechanical gadgets or tools are available in general that can be used for basal application in cotton but, particularly for topdressing in standing cotton crops, no suitable mechanization took place. Traditional practices of a top dressing of fertilizer mainly include; manual broadcasting of fertilizer on the soil surface, or applying it manually in a ring basin followed by hoeing, placing fertilizer at some depth in case of pit method, or broadcasting with the tractor-operated centrifugal broadcaster. In the context of precision agriculture, target or spot-localized fertilizer placement would play a significant role in increasing the efficiency of fertilizer application.:
Technology Details:
The developed machine comes with a plant detection-based automatic fertilizer dispensing mechanism for spot fertilizer delivery suitable for cotton and similar widely spaced crops. The developed machine can precisely apply granular fertilizer at the target location (near to plant root zone) alongside the crop row, thus, avoiding fertilizer application in vacant space between two plants in the row. Apart from spot fertilizer application simultaneously it performs the inter-row weeding operation. The developed prototype consists of a fertilizer box, a fluted roller metering unit to meter fertilizer, a secondary collection chamber attached to the outlet of the fluted roller unit for holding metered fertilizer, a fertilizer delivery tube to carry fertilizer to furrow opener boot, a plant detection lever to detect plant along the row, fertilizer dispensing system includes connecting rod to synchronize plant detection with a cut-off mechanism to regulate trigger based fertilizer delivery, sweeps for weeding and combination of chain, sprockets to power the fluted roller metering unit. This results in significant savings in time and operational cost of both operations i.e., fertilizer application and weeding.