Abstract:
Conservation agriculture is based on optimizing yields and profits, to achieve a balance of agricultural economic and environmental benefits. It is the integration of ecological management with modern scientific agricultural production. Thus, there is need to make available various equipment for conservation agriculture that farmers can afford, operate and maintain with their own resources. This project work focused on the development of pulse planter that is cheap, affordable by the rural farmers, easy to maintain and less laborious to use. The planter has the capability of delivering the seeds precisely with uniform depth in the furrow, and also with uniform spacing between the seeds. The planter consists of the mainframe, adjustable handle, seed hopper, seed metering device, adjustable furrow opener, furrow coverer, drive wheels, seed tube and disc coulter. Most of the parts were fabricated from mild steel whilst seed tube was made from rubber material and the bevel gear was bought out. The pulse planter is incorporated with a coulter to cut residue and thrashes on the soil after clearing. For this design, the drive shaft from the drive wheels controls the seed plate shaft via a bevel gear. The results obtained from the trial tests showed that the planter functioned properly with a seed rate of 0.96 kg/h, the average seed spacing for field test is 28.6 cm and the average percentage of seed damage is 6.84. The field efficiency of 76.8% and average field capacity of 0.67 ha/h were obtained from the test. The estimated cost of the planter is N74,602. Thus, the development of the planter allows conservation agriculture systems to be successfully adopted by farmers.
