Mechanization of Groundnut Cultivation for Small Holder Farming Community

Groundnut also known as peanut is one of the world’s fifteen leading food crops and cultivated throughout the world. It is consumed in many ways such as vegetable cooking oil, kernels, roasted nuts, salted nuts, milk, butter, cheese, bakery products etc. Groundnut can be cultivated in kharif, rabi and summer seasons. Well drained loose and friable sandy loams and sandy clay loam soils are preferable. Optimum soil temperature for good germination is about 300C.Sowing is the prime operation in cultivation practice of any crop which directly affects production and timely sowing is essential for utilizing available sources of power. Power tiller operated machines may play vital role in groundnut cultivation for small scale farming system as the average holding size is close to 1 ha and more than 86% of India’s farming community are small and marginal farmers. Present efforts were carried out for the development and testing of power tiller operated strip-till multi-crop planter for the mechanization of groundnut cultivation in small holder farming community. With increasing the level of mechanization by adopting appropriate matching implements for groundnut cultivation in small farming community, the production and productivity could be increased by reducing cost of cultivation and increasing input use efficiency. Efforts are being made to adopt conservation tillage practices with power tiller operated matching implements for small holder farming focusing on groundnut cultivation. The developed planter was tested under three different tillage practices as conventional tillage (CT), strip tillage (ST) and zero tillage (ZT). Three types of rotary blades viz. L-type, J-type and C-type were used in strip-tilling operation. The developed machine was evaluated in terms of field capacity, fuel consumption, draft, seed germination and crop yield. Average groundnut yield in ST was maximum (1.87 t ha-1) followed by CT (1.83 t ha-1) and ZT (1.76 t ha-1). The cost of cultivation was maximum for CT followed by ZT and ST.