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Development of a Power Tiller-Operated Inter-Row Planter for Cowpea in Cotton Strips

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Abstract

A power tiller-operated two-row inter-row planter for sowing cowpea in cotton strips was developed, and its performance was evaluated both in the laboratory and in the field. The developed planter consisted of a frame, seed hoppers, seed metering mechanism, furrow opener, furrow covering device, power transmission mechanism and ground wheels. Before fabricating the furrow opener, structural analysis was carried out in ANSYS software and found that the designed model is safe and stress developed at 140 N load also showed less than yield strength of material. The prototype seed metering mechanism was tested using a sticky belt. The effect of main operating parameters—forward speed (1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 km/h) and cell size (10, 12 and 14 mm) on performance of seed metering mechanism—was studied in terms of missing index, multiple index, seed rate, seed spacing, degree of variation and quality of feed index. By applying response surface method, the optimum operating conditions were found to be 1.0 km/h and cell size of 12 mm. The performance parameters’—missing index, multiple index, quality index as, seed rate, of seed spacing and degree of variation at optimized conditions—were found to be 10.3%, 6.32%, 83.88%, 20.6 kg/ha, 13.8 cm and 10.2% with composite desirability of 0.86. The developed inter-row planter’s performance was evaluated in the field for sowing cowpea seeds (with two pairs of cowpea having row-to-row distance of 30 cm in 90 cm row spacing of cotton) on cotton strips. The average depth of placement of seed, plant-to-plant distance and seed rate in the field trail were found to be 6.2 cm, 10.5 cm and 22.0 kg/ha, respectively. The effective field capacity and field efficiency of the inter-row planter were 0.06 ha/h and 75.2%, respectively.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express sincere gratitude to the Head, Dept. of Farm Machinery and Power, and the Dean, College of Agricultural Engineering, Raichur, Karnataka (India), for providing necessary arrangements, instrumentation and workforce.

Funding

This research is funded by University of Agricultural sciences, Raichur, to carry out postgraduate research work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Farm Machinery and Power Engineering, University of Agricultural Sciences, Raichur, Karnataka, 584104, India

    Shrinath P. Abhyankar, M. Anantachar, K. V. Prakash & Sushilendra Advi Rao

  2. Quality Evaluation and Improvement Division, ICAR-NINFET, Kolkata, 700040, India

    T. Nageshkumar

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  1. Shrinath P. Abhyankar
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  3. T. Nageshkumar
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Contributions

SB conducted this research and collected the necessary data. NK did analysis of the data and wrote draft paper. A designed this research and corrected the final paper, and P assisted in statistical analysis and field evaluation. S conducted field studies.

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Correspondence to T. Nageshkumar.

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Abhyankar, S.P., Anantachar, M., Nageshkumar, T. et al. Development of a Power Tiller-Operated Inter-Row Planter for Cowpea in Cotton Strips. Agric Res 12, 308–318 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40003-023-00647-w

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