Background:
India is one of the leading tobacco exporting countries in the world. India accounts for 5.8% of the international trade and ranks 5th after Brazil, U.S.A, Turkey and Zimbabwe. Even though the cultivation of tobacco is spread all over the country, commercial cultivation of tobacco is concentrated in the States like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and west Bengal. Tobacco cultivated and processing is an important source of agricultural income and employment. Tobacco farmers do face immeasurable challenges throughout their farming period and beyond. Among the many challenges facing tobacco production is that, tobacco is said to be labour intensive. Growing tobacco is pains taking, labour intensive, and children are often used in the manual work of preparing the land, planting the seeds, watering, weeding, applying fertilizers and pesticides, harvesting, stringing and hanging the leaves for curing, carrying the harvested leaves from the farms to the curing barns and then packing them. As here is no indigenous machine for transplanting tobacco seedling, a tractor operated tobacco seedling transplanter with spot application of water has been developed.:
Technology Details:
A tractor operated tobacco seedling transplanter with spot application of water has been developed in collaboration with ICAR-CTRI, Rajamundhry. The equipment consists of mainframe which can be attached to standard three-point hitch arrangement of the tractor, the metering mechanism, operator's seat, furrow openers, seedling planting mechanism, Water tank, system for spot application of water and soil compaction wheel are mounted on the main frame with necessary supports. The nursery grown in the protrays can be dropped through the metering mechanism by two operators who are seated behind the equipment. A shoe type soil opener opens up the soil. The seedlings, which is dropped down from the seedling placement mechanism will be placed in the opened-up soil. The soil compaction wheels which follows the soil opener closes the soil thereby giving stability to the seedlings. The plant to plant spacing can be easily changed from 50, 60 and 75 cm. The row to row spacing can be changed from 65 cm, 70 cm and 100 cm to suit the different region demand. Both the seedling dropping mechanism and watering mechanism will be actuated through cam arrangement fitted in the transmission system to synchronize both seedlings dropping and watering. The spot application of watering system has been attached such way that, the after planting the watering will be done on the spot nearer to the seedling planted. The field capacity of the equipment is 0.2 to 0.3 hah-1 and the missing percentage is to the tune of 2-3 percent at a working speed of 1.5 kmh-1. The quantity of water applied per plant is 200-250 ml. The plant establishment was more than 95 percent. The cost of the equipment is Rs 1,00,000. The savings in cost is 65 percent. Saving in labour is 85 percent.