Development and evaluation of a two-row cotton planter with fertilizer applicator

A three-point hitch, tractor rear mounted, PTO operated cotton planter was developed at PAU, Ludhiana. It could create two bands (each 25 cm wide) of tilled soil at 67.5 cm centre-to-centre distance by rotary tillage; apply fertilizer at differential rate at different depths along the rows on both sides of seed, followed by levelling and seed placement at the centre of tilled band. Inclined plate metering mechanism was used to ensure precise dropping of two water soaked seeds per hill. All operations were completed in a single pass operation of the machine. Field experiments revealed that placement of 70% and 30% of the recommended dose of fertilizer at 10 and 20 cm depths, respectively, showed signifcantly higher seed cotton yield (2.74 t.ha⁻¹) than manual broadcasting of fertilizer (2.30 t.ha⁻¹).