3RD INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON TECHNOLOGY - ENGINEERING & SCIENCE - Kuala Lumpur - Malaysia (2017-02-09)

Sri Single Seedling Transplanting Implement: Breakthrough To Challenges On Sri Planting And Spacing Techniques

In rice production, seedling quality and transplanting potentials stand as a prerequisite for the proper completion of rice production operations in securing optimum yield. The overall objective of this research was to develop a transplanting implement capable of placing rice seedling singly into the field by dropping through a gated opener with respect to System of Rice Intensification planting and spacing conditions. It was aimed at using seedlings established from SRI-tray of 924 separated growing cavities. It was designed with adjustable spacing options for both within and between rows of 25 cm, 30 cm and 40 cm respectively leading to nine SRI spacing options (25 cm × 25 cm, 25 cm × 30 cm, 25 cm × 40 cm, 30cm × 30 cm, 30 cm × 40 cm and 40 cm × 40 cm, respectively) to suite SRI practitioners’ preference. The performance was evaluated and the measured parameters were suitable growing media, planting speed, percentages of single seedling placement per hill, missing hills and multiple planting as well as field capacity and field efficiency. The data indicated that speed of operation run at 0.18 m/s reported high significance percentage of single seedling per hill when subjected to spacing patterns of 25 × 35 cm (84%), 25 × 25 cm (81%), 30 × 30 cm (73%) and 40 × 40 cm (83%) but decreased with the increasing speed of 0.45 m/s as 53%, 56% and 72%; thus surprising stability on 40 × 40 cm of 83%. The results obtained on growing media revealed that clay with compost had the highest significance with respect to the weight of seedling (25.3 g) giving the loosening index of 66 seconds and the planting depth of 16 mm when transplanting in the field. The field capacity and field efficiency revealed that at a speed of 0.18 m/s, the values were 1.29 ha/hr and 79.5%, respectively but when it was fixed or increased to 0.45 m/s these values changed to 1.55 ha/hr and 75%. Therefore, this implement serves a breakthrough in responding to the challenges of mechanized SRI transplanting to precisely transplant seedling singly with respect to Nine (9) SRI spacing options; as the existing rice transplanting machines could not soundly respond to the profitable SRI target due to their transplanting behavior of placing seedlings in traumatic manner with roots tightly interconnected thereby making the seedling to experience transplanting shock. Furthermore, these transplanters encouraged multiple and reasonable number of unplanted areas thereby forcing farmers paying for replanting and hence increasing the entire rice production cost. Likewise, considering the number of attempt made and continuously in making by many researchers in trying to ameliorate the planting patterns of these machines to match with the SRI planting and spacing conditions which many a times proved abortive as a result of only relaying on changing the picking condition of the claws but not considering the SRI spacing standard, and still remain challenging. Table 2: Field capacity at varying speeds on planting area of 0.027ha AFC (ha/hr) TFC (ha/hr) FE (%) S1 0.035 0.044 79.54 S2 0.037 0.048 77.08 S3 0.042 0.056 75.00 Legend: S1 = 0.18 m/s; S2 = 0.24 m/s; S3 = 0.48 m/s; AFC = Actual field capacity; TFC = Theoretical field capacity; FE = Field efficiency
Keywords: System of Rice Intensification, Conventional Transplanters, Spacing Patterns, Missing Hills, Loosening Index

ZUBAIRU BASHAR, AIMRUN WAYAYOK, MOHAMMAD RAZIF, AMIN M.S.M