Background:
Plastic mulch along with drip irrigation has tremendous potential for increasing crop and water productivity and profitability. Manual operations of raised bed forming, drip lateral and plastic mulch laying, and planting seeds in a plastic mulch are drudgery-prone, time-consuming, and laborious activities, which require about 29 man-days/ha. Therefore, tractor tractor-operated plastic mulch layer-cum-planter has been developed to perform various field operations such as raised bed formation, drip lateral and plastic mulch laying, and planting metered seed in plastic mulch in a single pass of the tractor:
Technology Details:
Tractor-operated plastic mulch layer-cum-planter performs raised bed formation, drip lateral and plastic mulch laying, and planting a metered seed in plastic mulch in a single pass of the tractor. The punch planting jaw has substantially net zero horizontal velocity at its bottom dead center while engaging in the soil surface, therefore the planting jaw rotates rearward when equipment is moving in the forward direction, which provides point contact with plastic mulch. The tractor’s hydraulic system is used to operate the eccentric slider crank mechanism with the help of a hydraulic motor (385 Nm) and chain and sprocket transmission system, whereas the vacuum is created in the housing of the seed metering mechanism through the aspirator blower operated by tractor PTO. The eccentric slider crank mechanism transmits the rotary motion of the driving disc into the vertical motion of the slider crank through the connecting rod and keeps the “D” profile at the end of the punch planting jaw, which opens in the soil. The pneumatic seed metering plate and eccentric slider crank mechanism are synchronized in such a way that the seed picked by the pneumatic metering plate gets dropped in planting jaws, which remain closed by holding the seed and open and placing the seed after entering into the plastic mulch utilizing slider crank mechanism.