National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS)
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PRINT ISSN : 2319-7692
Online ISSN : 2319-7706 Issues : 12 per year Publisher : Excellent Publishers Email : editorijcmas@gmail.com / submit@ijcmas.com Editor-in-chief: Dr.M.Prakash Index Copernicus ICV 2018: 95.39 NAAS RATING 2020: 5.38 |
Carrot (Daucus carota L.) is a major vegetable crop which is a good source for human diet. Carrot planting, conventionally done by manual dibbling, is a labour intensive and thus, costly operation. The mechanization of carrot planting aims to reduce the operational costs, minimizing human drudgery and enhance the production. The appropriate crop-machine and operational parameters were identified. Tractor operated prototype mechanical carrot planter was designed and evaluated for its field performance using treatments viz. uncoated carrot seeds (S1), biogas slurry coated seeds (S2) and Thirame coated seeds (S3). The average plant spacing was (5.1 cm) nearly equal to theoretical seed spacing of 5 cm for treatment S2. The best quality of planting was observed for treatment S3 with quality of feed index of 82.86 per cent, followed by treatment S2 (80 per cent) and S1 uncoated seed (67.4 per cent). Lower miss and multiple indices were observed for treatment S3 (8.57 per cent) followed by treatment S2 (10.71 per cent) and S1 (15.71 per cent). The optimum plant population per meter length of bed was 72 for S2 against theoretical plant population of 80 plants. Significantly higher carrot root dimensions such as length and diameter were recorded under treatment S2 (21.92 cm and 3.37 cm). The higher carrot yield of 20.14 t ha-1 was recorded under S2 followed by 14.69 t ha-1for S1. The low cost of operation of Rs.1441ha-1 was recorded for mechanical carrot planter. The minimum draft of 378 kgf and fuel consumption of 4.2 lph was recorded. The adoption of mechanical planter for planting carrot could help save cost of Rs.1059 ha-1 (53.88 per cent) in comparison to manual planting.
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