1 Department of Agricultural Engineering, North Eastern Regional Institute of Science and Technology, Nirjuli-791 109, Arunachal Pradesh.
2 Department of Agricultural and Food Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur-72l 302
A single row laboratory model rice transplanter was developed based on the design of power tiller operated APAU rice transplanter. In the developed model the transplanter was stationary, while a tray containing soil was movable. The slot size of the fixed fork finger was decided based on the number of seedlings to be picked up during planting. The transplanter was evaluated for both root washed and mat type seedlings, at two levels each of the size of finger slot, age of seedlings and depths of planting and three levels of speeds of operation.
The average population of established root washed seedling varied from 3.38 to 4.20 and for mat type seedling from 5.40 to 6.89 per hill. The inclination of seedling was about 73° to 75° for both types of seedlings. The laboratory model can operate with root washed seedling of age 35–40 days with 23.3% missing hills and 6.4% floating hills when set for a depth of 6 cm and operated at 35 strokes per min. With mat type seedlings, when set at 6 cm depth and operated at 35 strokes per min, it gave 18.6% missing hills and 6.4% fully floating hills. However, 3 mm slot size finger was found to be suitable for both types of seedlings.
