Abstract
This study evaluated the performance of a seed planter against the modified version, and hand planting method. A performance test was carried out on the two planters and hand method on a piece of land of known dimension over a period of time. Performance was evaluated using five (5) different parameters; sowing rate, area covered, throughput capacity, efficiency and level of uniformity. Sowing rate showed that hand method had the lowest sowing rate of 1 seed per sec, while the modified planter had the highest sowing rate of 5 seeds per sec. The modified planter had the highest for area covered at 91.5 m2, while the existing planter performed second best at 73.5 m2. Throughput capacity was highest for the modified planter at 292.8 kg/hr and lowest for hand planting method at 29.3 kg/hr. Efficiency result showed that hand method was better than the existing method at an efficiency value of 94 % against 89 % for existing planter; the modified planter performed best at 97 % efficiency value, while uniformity result showed that the modified planter was the best along the row and column arrangement at 97 % for both, while hand method had the lowest for both cases at 85 % and 88 % respectively. This study showed that the modified planter performed better than the two others in all the parameters assessed.
Highlights
Planting is the actual placement of seed or vegetative material into the soil
The three planters for this study were each used to carry out a performance test on a piece of land of known dimension over a period of time; performance was evaluated using five (5) different parameters
Throughput capacity was highest for the modified planter and lowest for hand planting method
Summary
Planting is the actual placement of seed or vegetative material into the soil. Planting could be by seed or planting of vegetative materials, some crops are propagated solely through seed examples are maize, rice, cowpea, millet, pepper, vegetable and so on. It enables easy and adequate spacing of the seed It can be used for planting in a single row as well as multiple rows. Manual method of seed planting results in low seed placement, spacing efficiencies and serious backache for the farmer which limits the size of field that can be planted. To achieve the best performance from a seed planter, the above limits are to be optimized by proper design and selection of the component required on the machine to suit the need of crops Adisa and Braid (2012) designed and constructed a manually operated flute planter/fertilizer distributor which was found to be 94% efficient in seed spacing but could not be used on the ridged seed bed and requires quite some effort and time to change seed drill size. All of the above designs were reported to have got quite promising results
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