Farm power availability for sustainable agriculture development in Punjab state of India

It has transforming from subsistence farming which was dependent on human and animals, to mechanized farming using inanimate power sources like tractors, diesel engines, electric motors, etc. In Punjab agriculture, the human and animal power has substantially reduced from 7.5 to 0.69 % and 73 to 0.61% respectively due to increase in mechanical power from 17 to 76 % and electrical power from 1.7 to 23.5 from 1960-61 to 2012-13. The intensity of farm power availability has increased from 0.37 to 5.68 kW ha-1 during the same period. Correspondingly there has been increase in the cropping intensity (112 to 196%), production (3.16 to 28.58 mt) and productivity (668 to 3638 kg ha-1) of total food grains

Anthropometric survey of farm workers of Ladakh region of India and its application in equipment design

Abstract: The environment and resultant discomfort has severe impact on overall working efficiency of human and machine while using farm tools and machinery in hills.  The Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir State of India is predominantly hilly.  Anthropometric data of agricultural workers is very essential for the safe and efficient design of farm machinery.  In the present studies, an anthropometric survey was carried out for agricultural workers of Ladakh region, wherein 90 male and female agricultural workers were selected and 79 body dimensions were precisely measured and recorded from each subject, thereafter analysed statistically.  For making the data comprehensive and more useful, a set of 23 body dimensions, which are having direct implications on agricultural tool/implement design were selected, and compared with data of different regions of India and also with those of Egyptian, Japanese, British, Thailand, Mexican and Chinese workers.  There were significant differences in stature and other body dimensions among the populations.  From these data, it appears that values of body dimensions of Ladakh workers were lesser than those of five other regions of India and six other countries as mentioned above.  In stature, Ladakhi men were shorter by 5.08 cm as compared to North-eastern Indian male workers.  Similarly, Ladakhi women were shorter by 12.65 cm as compared to British women.  The Ratio of sitting height to stature (RSH) of Indian women (present study) was found lower (0.46) as compared to those of Egyptian (0.52), Japanese (0.53), British (0.53), Thailand (0.53) and Chinese (0.54).  The obtained results indicate that Indian women are short legged.  These results suggest that it is essential to generate the necessary anthropometric data of different regions of the country through extensive surveys for designing region specific farm machineries to properly exploit the working potential of farm workers.  Application of this data on tool design is illustrated through some examples.   Keywords: anthropometric survey, body dimensions, agricultural workers, tool desig

Development of an Electronic Actuating Control Mechanism to Operate a Remotely Controlled 2-Wheel Rice Transplanter

Mechanical transplanters are adopted to reduce human drudgery in manual transplanting. Different types of manual and self-propelled paddy transplanters are commercially available. The human involvement is higher for operating a 2-wheel paddy transplanter operator has to walk 10-22 km behind the machine in a day in puddled field conditions under high temperature (38-440 C) and humid conditions (70-80% RH) in summer. Besides that, the operator has to walk within the 30 cm row width, which causes chafing between the thighs of an operator. To reduce the physical and physiological workload of an operator, an integrated control lever actuating mechanism with gear motors was developed to operate a 2-wheel paddy transplanter remotely. The inductive proximity sensors (SN04-N distance detector) were used to control the crank rotation position of the gear motors, motor drives (BTS 7960), and microcontroller (STM32F4) was used to connect with the auto-driver kit to control the motor mechanism and sensors. The auto-driver kit consisted of a variety of accessories, a physical programmable circuit board, and software, that runs on a PC, used to write and upload computer code as a simplified version of C++ to the physical board. Although the initial cost of the machine with the developed system has been increased up to 28%, but at the same time the effective field capacity has been increased from 0.158 ± 0.02 ha h-1 to 0.175 ± 0.04, resulting the area covered per day and per year has also increased up to 11%. With the development of remotely controlled system, the labor requirement has been reduced from 20± 1 to 13± 1 man h ha-1, which results reduction up to 40%. Moreover, the human fatigue in terms of physical and physiological work load involved while walking behind the transplanter has been eliminated at much extent. As compared to the existing walk-behind type paddy transplanter, the net profit with the developed system rise up to 18.50 to 26.61 % per year and a boost of  34.10 to 51.63% in benefit-cost ratio. Field evaluation of a developed remote-controlled system for a two-wheel rice transplanter would be viable, reducing fatigue among machine operators/farm workers while increasing work productivity and safety

Development of Motorized Walnut Dehuller

Most of walnut production is manually hulled in India. Green walnut is processed in dry condition by removing the outer shell. Removing of outer shell of walnut with a knife by hand is difficult at a low production rate of 0.025- 0.030 t.h-1. A motorized walnut dehuller based on the principle of shearing-off the hull of a green walnut by shearing force was developed and evaluated, with peripheral speed and number of heaping days being optimized to make the best quality of hulling process. Results indicated that the effective throughput capacity, hulling efficiency and fully hulled walnut percentage increased with increase in peripheral speed. Similarly, hulling efficiency increased with increase in number of heaping days before hulling, but the fruit shell staining and kernel discoloration took place with increase in the number of heaping days after harvest. At peripheral speed of 6.41 m.s-1 and 4-day heaping period, the hulling capacity of the developed machine was 0.260 t.h-1 with hulling efficiency of 79.55 per cent

Energy Input-Output Analyses of Major Field Vegetable Crops Production in Punjab

The energy consumption pattern in Indian agriculture has changed with a marked shift from human and animal power to electrical and mechanical sources of energy (tractors, diesel engines, self-propelled machines). The rising cost of production and depleting energy sources are paramount concerns for the maximization of productivity with minimum input of energy and cost. A study was performed for determining the energy productivity of five major vegetable crops (potato, tomato, muskmelon, garden pea, cauliflower) production systems. Significantly higher (p<0.05) energy consumption was observed for potato cultivation (53,412 ± 2,388 MJ.ha-1), followed by tomato (47,489 ± 1,183 MJ.ha-1), cauliflower (39,367 ± 1,127 MJ.ha-1), muskmelon (37,827 ± 856 MJ.ha-1), and garden pea (24,625 ± 497 MJ.ha-1). Irrigation was observed to be the major energy-consuming farm operation, followed by transportation of farmyard manure (FYM)/fertilisers and produce. Based on the significant contribution of non-renewable and commercial energy in the production of major vegetable crops, the agricultural system was observed to be vulnerable to increase in energy prices through petroleum as well as fertiliser prices. There is a need to include more energy- and cost-effective farm mechanisation and irrigation systems

Energy use efficiency of crop residue management for sustainable energy and agriculture conservation in NW India

In the Indo-Gangetic plains of South Asia, the triple challenges of diminishing farm profitability, deteriorating natural resources and energy deficits threaten conventional agricultural sustainability. This threat is intensified by the open field burning of crop residues that not only squander an indirect renewable source of energy but also impair the soil and environment quality. The crop residues can be used as organic manure by retaining the residues as mulch in the field. After a long term (5-yrs) study, it was concluded that crop residues biomass contributed maximum (∼79%) in total input energy (1,68,556 MJ ha−1) in conservation agriculture (CA) based systems, however fertilizer application (non-renewable energy source) contributed maximum (∼50%) to the total energy (40,636 MJ ha−1) in conventional tillage (CT) based maize-wheat cropping system.CA based maize systems recorded higher input energy and energy intensiveness by 23 and 57% respectively, and recorded almost 44% lower energy use efficiency and energy productivity compared to CT based maize systems. On 5 years average basis, Zero tillage based maize-wheat-mungbean with nutrient expert cropping system(ZT/MWMb + NE) utilized 351% more input energy, which resulted in25%higher output energy and 363% higher EI compared to CT/MW (40,636 MJ ha−1, 4,20,197 MJ ha−1, 39.60 MJ USD−1)