Investigations on improvising six row manually operated paddy transplanter and cono weeder through the application of value engineering job plan

Abstract

Paddy is one of the major crops cultivated in Asian Countries (Anantachar et al. 2013). Agricultural engineering researchers and manufacturers have developed different farm equipment and machineries for sowing, planting, weeding, harvesting and threshing for paddy cultivation. Particularly, the paddy cultivating equipment and machineries namely transplanter, weeder, harvester and thresher which were developed by the researchers are largely used by the farmers in paddy fields. However, a careful study would indicate that these farm equipment and machineries are largely used by the farmers with high financial strength. This is due to reason that these farm equipment and machineries are either partially or fully automated and hence, than prices are so high to prevent their usage by the farmers who are financially weak. Because of this situation, farmers with poor financial strength use manually operated farm machineries. However, the value of these manually operated farm equipment and machineries is poor in comparison with that of the partially or fully automated farm equipment and machineries. Hence, researches are required to newlineenhance the value of manually operated farm equipment and machineries which are used by the farmers who are financially weak. This kind of research has not been reported in literature arena. In order to overcome this practice oriented research gap, the doctoral work reported in this thesis was carried out. Improvising the machineries used for transplanting paddy and removing weeds in paddy field fell within the scope of the doctoral work reported in this thesis. newline newline newline