Development and Evaluation of a Single Row Manual Vegetable Transplanter

In order to reduce drudgery involved in traditional transplanting of vegetable seedlings and to enhance field capacity, a manual single row vegetable transplanter was designed, developed and evaluated for transplanting of bringal, chilli and tomato seedlings. The device consistd of different component like hopper, handle, seedling delivery tube, jaw opening lever and jaw mouth. The implement penetrates into the soil by applying little force while holding with handle, seedling is dropped into seedling delivery tube then the jaw is opened with lever. The transplanting mean effective field capacity observed from trials was 0.029 ha/h with field efficiency of 91.34%. Significantly lower labour was required with developed prototype over traditional method with an average saving of 52.83 percent of time and labour. The activity of work load was found as moderate with maximum heart rate (112 beats/min) and energy expenditure (9.1 KJ/min) with developed transplanter. Mean value of overall discomfort rating, musculo-skeletal problem, rating of perceived exertion were also found lesser in comparison with traditional method. The mean cost of transplanting for three different seedlings was calculated to be 1308.16 Rs/ha for the single row manual vegetable transplanter in comparison to 2482.2 Rs/ha with the traditional method of transplanting.