Narender, Atul Kumar Shrivastava and Shalini Chaturvedi
Abstract
Manual digging of the turmeric (Curcuma longa) rhizome is labour intensive due ploughing of the land in which the clumps are carefully lifted with spade and gathered by hand picking. In view of this a tractor operated digger was developed and performance was evaluated at three level of speed (2.06, 2.9, 4.18 km/ h) and blade angle (15o, 20o, 25o) of digger. The performance parameters viz. Exposed crop (%), Undug crop (%), Damage crop (%), Digging efficiency (%) and field capacity was evaluated at different levels of speed and blade angle. The saving in labour and cost of digging the turmeric crop was found to be 67.08 % and 65.43%, respectively. The field capacity of the developed digger was 0.133 ha/h.