PERFORMANCEEVALUATIONOFMANUALOPERATED.docVIP

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF MANUAL OPERATED SINGLE ROW WEEDER FOR GROUNDNUT CROP RAM BHAVIN1, M. S. KHARDIWAR2 1,2Polytechnic in Agricultural Engineering, AAU, Dahod-389 151, Gujarat, India ABSTRCTS An experiment was conducted to evaluate the field performance of developed manual operated Weeder was carried out at Department of Farm Machinery and Power of College of Agricultural Engineering and Technology, Junagndh. Various parameters such as field capacity, weeding efficiency, draft requirement and performance index of the weeder were considered during the test. The developed weeder can work up to 4.0 cm depth of operation with field capacity of 0.0285 ha/h. highest weeding efficiency was obtained (i.e. up to 80.42%). draft requirement was 34.4 kg for 20 cm width of the weeder. and the performance index of the developed weeder was obtained 1210.53 Keywords: Weeder , weeding efficiency, field capacity, Field performance, INTRODUCTION India is a vast country having agriculture sector as the backbone of its economy. India has total land acquisition of about 329 Mha out of which 166 Mha (Sahay, 2008) of land is under cultivation. The population of India is more than 110 crore and is increasing day by day at an alarming rate. Hence, it is required to produce more food to meet the needs of growing population. This can be achieved only by either increasing the land under cultivation or by adopting the farming techniques which would increase the crop yields. As it is not possible to increase the land under cultivation, the left option is to increase the crop yield. The yield of crop can be increased by using HYV (high yield variety) seeds, using proper agricultural practices and by preventing yield loss due to natural factors like weeds, insects, rodents, etc. Out of these factors weeds is one of them and which is quite important. The qualitative and quantitative crop production depends upon the effectiveness and timeliness of weeding; as weeds are biggest crop