Progressive Horticulture

Onion (Allium cepa L.) is one of the major vegetable crops grown in different parts of India mainly by small and marginal farmers. Generally, the onion seeds are sown in nursery and transplanted with row to row spacing of 15 cm and plant to plant spacing of 7.5 cm to get optimum yield. The labour requirement in manual transplanting of onion seedlings is as high as 100-120 man-days/ha as 8.9 lakh seedlings per hectare are to be transplanted. Because of high requirement and shortage of labour, the area under onion cultivation is low and can be increased by mechanization of this crop. A two row manually operated onion seeder having inclined plate type metering mechanism was developed. The prototype consists of frame, power/ground wheels, seed hopper and furrow openers. It was evaluated by using three different plates having 12, 24 and 36 grooves on the basis of missing index, multiple index, average seed spacing and quality of feed index in the field based on the germination of crop. The crop was sown on one metre wide bed prepared with the help of tractor operated bed former. The forward speed was kept in the range of 1-1.5 km/h and an angle of inclination of seed plate was kept 55^o with horizontal. The number of plants achieved by plate having 12 grooves was less (10) than the required number of plants (14/m), whereas, it was higher with plates having 24 and 36 grooves, i.e, 17.8 and 30.13 per meter length, respectively. The crop sown with 24 groove plate have plant to plant distance of 5.20 cm, miss index as 0.05, multiple index as 0.38 and quality of feed index as 0.57 when compared with theoretical spacing of 7.5 cm.