Development of mechanical urea briquette applicator for SRI

Abstract

India is the second largest consumer of fertilizers in the world. In wetland paddy cultivation, only 30-40% of nitrogen applied is fruitfully utilized as about two-third is lost through gaseous losses, runoff, and leaching or is immobilized in the soil. Deep placement of urea briquette (UB) by hand after conventional line transplanting at the rate of one UB near the centre of each four rice hills and at soil depth of 7-10 cm reduces nitrogen losses and increases fertilizer use efficiency, but is a time consuming and labour intensive process. A two-row prototype urea briquette applicator was designed, developed and evaluated under simulated condition of system of rice intensification technique (25 cm × 25 cm) in the field of ICAR-IARI in 2013-14. Row-to-row spacing was 50 cm as the distance between two furrow openers. The mechanical urea briquette applicator recorded average distance of placement of 51.44 cm in the row, depth of placement of 7.66 cm, draft of 92.41 N, field capacity of 0.05 ha/h, field efficiency of 69% and field machine index of 69.6% during the operation in the field at forward speed of 0.87 km/h.