Development and testing of a wide row ridger, inter row cultivator and digger for nucleus seed potato production

Nucleus seed potato, in traditional seed production system, is grown in two stages. In stage I indexed seed tubers are planted at 1200 x 1200 mm spacing and in stage II planting is done clone-wise in 1200 x 200 mm geometry. Traditional machines and equipment used for potato production are not suited for the crop geometry of stage I and stage II. Therefore most of the field work in these initial stages of seed potato production is carried out manually, which causes lot of human drudgery and is more time consuming. To mechanize production of potato in stage I and II, three tractor operated equipment viz. wide row ridger, inter row cultivator and a digger shaker were developed and field tested. Effective field capacity of wide row ridger, cultivator and digger was found to be 0.5 ha/h, 0.6 ha/h and 1.44 ha/day respectively. All these newly designed machines were successful in replacing the traditional machines and manual field operations except for potato picking.