PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF SELF PROPELLED SIX ROW TEFF SEEDLING TRANSPLANTER

Abstract

To study the performance of the developed teff transplanting machine, the parameters used were hill spacing (cm), number of seedlings per hill (No.), transplanting depth (cm), missing hills (%), defective hills (No.), buried hills (%), damaged hills (%), floating hills (%), transplanting efficiency (%), time requirement (min), fuel consumption (L), field capacity (ha h-1), and field efficiency (%). The experiments were carried out using a randomized complete block design (RCBD) comparing machine transplanting and manual transplanting. Both transplanting methods were evaluated at three seeding rates of 60, 80, and 120 g per tray and three forward speeds of 0.6, 0.8, and 1.2 km h-1. Each treatment was replicated three times. Data analysis was performed using ANOVA, and the comparison of means was determined using the Least Significant Difference (LSD) test at the 5% level of significance. The mean values of hill-to-hill spacing (13.82 and 12.96 cm), number of seedlings per hill (3.94 and 5.00 No.), and transplanting depth (3.79 and 4.04 cm) for the two treatments, respectively, showed no significant difference at the 5% probability level. However, the mean values of missing hills (9.69 and 12.72%), floating hills (1.78 and 4.61%), buried hills (1.39 and 3.36%), damaged hills (2.22 and 7.72%), defective hills (15.11 and 28.56%), and transplanting efficiency (84.89 and 71.44%) differed significantly at the 5% probability level. The actual field capacity, effective field capacity, and field efficiency of the machine and manual transplanting were 0.055 and 0.011 ha h-1, 0.037 and 0.0099 ha h-1, and 67.27% and 87.61%, respectively.