Design, Development and Performance Evaluation of Manually Operated Groundnut Planter

Abstract

Groundnut is one of the key food crops for human and animal consumption and raw materials in industries. In this work, a manually operated groundnut planter was designed to require less operating force to reduce the seed damage and missing rates. During the laboratory calibration, the average seed rate in the planter was 66.40 kg/ha. The mean percentage of seed damage assessed from the planter is 0.45%, indicating the gentleness of the seeds during its operation. Minimum and maximum variations in the seed spacing are 19.4 cm and 19.7 cm, respectively, which is considered reasonable spacing. In addition, the missing index, which is a measure of the percentage hills where seed was missing, was 2.7% and 4.3% respectively for 1.5 km/h and 2.5 km/h forward speed, which gave better performance at lower operating speeds. Field testing of the manual groundnut planter showed satisfactory performances. Its mean seed rate was 65.08 kg/ha, while the missing index was 3.67%. The theoretical and actual field capacities recorded were 0.09 ha/h and 0.077 ha/h, respectively, with a field efficiency of 86.57%. The depth of seed placement, which fell within 4.1 cm, is appropriate for planting groundnut. It was also found that use of this equipment was easy, both for males and females, which shows its practical utility for smallholder farmers. A manually operated groundnut planter has been fabricated with locally available materials; hence, it was relatively inexpensive and simple to construct.