Design and development of onion drum seeder for direct sowing of Onion (Allium cepa L) Seeds

In India the area under onion cultivation is about 1.064 ha with 15.1 Mt of bulb production. The average yield of onion in India is about 14.2 t/ha which is very low as compared to the world average yield of 19.1 t/ha. The labour requirement in manual transplanting of onion seedlings is as high as 100-120 man-day/ha as 8.9 lakh seedlings per hectare are to be transplanted. Efficient machinery helps in timely farm operation, input use efficiency, increasing productivity. Onion can also be grown by direct seeding method which is an evolving technology and this can also help in saving labour therefore, the design and development of onion drum seeder was done in the department of Farm Machinery and Power Engineering of PAU, Ludhiana, Punjab. The forwarding speed of onion drum seeder was 1 to 1.5 km/hr. The field capacity observed was 0.05 ha/hr and field efficiency was 83 per cent. The draft calculated was 10.61 kgf. Onion drum seeder was capable of sowing six row at once with row to row spacing of 10 cm and seed to seed spacing of 7.5 cm.