Abstract:
In India, transplanting of vegetable seedling of different crops depends mainly on human labour. In changing scenario of agricultural mechanization, ergonomics plays crucial role for effective operation. Therefore the study was undertaken to fabricate two row manual operated vegetable transplanter for tomato. A low cost manual operated vegetable transplanter is developed for transplanting for seedling of by raising beds. It consists of dropping structure, main frame, furrow opener, handle and seeding plate. Operating system of this developed transplanter involves raising of beds by serrated furrow opener and then by dropping of seedling through dropping structure, and then by moving forward the press wheels compresses the soil in the bed.It was tested by taking seedling of 3 speeds (0.083 m/sec, 0.079 m/sec 0.076m/sec). As per specification which has been designed, tomato transplanter was fabricated and performance evaluation is done by taking 45 days old tomato seedling various forward speed and three observation were taken to find out various parameters like missing percentage, width of operation, row spacing, no of seedling per hill, field capacity, plant spacing, moisture content, lenth of seeding, field efficiency and planting depth. The average field efficiency, theoretical field capacity, effective field capacity was found 72.9%, 0.0343ha/hr and 0.024ha/hr with planting depth of 5.8 cm .The missing percentage and no of seedling per hill was found to be 5.33% and 1.07. Results observed that with increasing speed of the transplanter, missing percentage, plant spacing, planting depth, row spacing, length of seedling increased and effective field capacity, theoretical field capacity and field efficiency decreased.