Development and Testing of a Tractor-Drawn Sugarcane Billets Planter

Abstract

Research on mechanization of sugarcane production however, is very low especially in the area of planting and currently there exists no known mechanical sugarcane planter in Nigeria. As a result, a mechanical planter was designed and fabricated. The main objective of the study is to develop and evaluate the performance of a tractor- drawn sugarcane planter. The planter was designed, fabricated and tested in the Agricultural and Bioresources Department of The Federal University of Technology, Minna. Itconsists of a frame, hopper, cane seed metering device, delivery funnel, furrow opener, furrow covering/press wheel as well as drive wheels which transmits power to the metering device through chain drive arrangement. The performance tests of the fabricated machine were carried out using four levels of cane seed lengths (250mm, 300mm, 350mm and 400mm) at four levels of operational speeds (6km/h, 8km/h 10km/h and 12km/h) and with four levels of cane diameters (16mm, 20mm, 24mm and 28mm).Field capacity, seed rate, cane seed damage, miss index, multiple index and quality of feed index were measured. It was observed that the operational speed of the machine varies directly with machine capacity and miss index. While cane diameter varies directly with miss index, it had no significant effect on machine capacity. The machine was found to perform optimally at 10km/h operational speed, 300mm cane seed length and 28mm cane diameter. At this optimal speed level, the machine had field capacity of 0.53ha/h (4.24ha/day) and miss index of 20.8%. The developed machine could reduce drudgery involved in manual sugarcane planting and save about substantial amount of labour and operating time.

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