Development and Performance Evaluation of Animal Drawn Integrated Secondary Tillage Implement

Weed control is the most difficult task on an agricultural farm. Three methods of weed control are commonly known in agriculture. They are mechanical, chemical and biological. Mechanical weed control is easily adopted by farmers once they get convinced of its advantage. Various types of mechanical weeders have been developed. This project is involved in construction and evaluation of integrated secondary tillage implement for harrowing after discovering that tools such as, traditional plow, spike tooth harrow, hoes require high drudgery, time consuming and high labor force with poor efficiency, used for preparation of seed bed before plantation. As a solution of this problem, mechanical integrated secondary tillage implement for harrowing is developed. This implement is made by integrating cultivator and spike tooth attached back and forth on trapezoidal frame. The cultivators cut the soil and uproot the weed roots, and the spike tooth harrow, pulverizes the soil and collects the uprooted weed roots. The developed integrated harrowing implement was tested on the primarily tilled field and the relevant data were collected and collected and statically analyzed. The field efficiency of the implement was 0.78% and has field capacity of 0.043 ha/hr. for clay soil. Thus, based on performance indicator taken to evaluate the treatments it can be concluded that the developed ISTI (integrated secondary tillage implement) has shown good result as compared to that of traditional plow.