Design, development and performance evaluation of manually operated groundnut planter

Abstract

A single row manually operated groundnut planter is developed and evaluated at actual field condition. The developed planter consists of the main frame, adjustable handle, furrow opener, seed hopper, drive wheels, seed tube and seed metering device. Most of this component are fabricated by using locally available material such as mild steel bars, acrylic sheet and pair of ball bearings. During field evaluation it was found that, the field capacity of the planter was 0.0675 ha/hr at average operating speed of 2.1 km/hr. The field efficiency of planter was 80.3 % and average depth of seed sowing was 55 mm. The maximum seed missing index and seed damage was found to be 4.6 % and 4 % respectively. The manually operated groundnut planter is precise in sowing, lower in weight, easy to use and maintenance free.