Milufarzana
Selina Banu
Md. Nazmus Sakib
Afsana Aktar
Mst. Arifa Sultana
Abstract
Bangladesh is a small country having huge population. More food must be produced daily to keep up with the expanding population. To fulfill the demand, we must increase crop yield by adopting the high farming techniques. After rice and wheat, maize is the most significant crop in the world and one of the country's most significant cereal crops. Currently, there is a large discrepancy between the amount of maize produced (4,700 thousand tons) and the yearly consumption (about two million tons) in Bangladesh. Designing and fabricating a manually operated push-type hilling corn machine with a double-wheel hoe and assessing the machine's technical and economic performance were the goals of the study. Corn hiller is farming implement used to create hills or ridges of soil around corn plants. Its additional task is to eradicate weeds from the corn fields. Although manual weeding is a popular practice in Bangladesh, but it is labor-intensive and presents significant challenges for farmers. So, this problem can be reduced by using this machine. The travelling speed of the machine was found 1.68 km/hr. The effective field capacity was 0.057 ha/hr, while the theoretical field capacity was 0.077 ha/hr. The machine's field efficiency was 74.0%. The turning loss and weeding efficiency of the machine were 25.7% and 69.4% respectively. The machine is easy to use and doesn't require an experienced operator. Since no fuel was used to run this machine, it did not produce any pollutants.
Keywords
Hilling corn; performance evaluation; push type; field capacity; operating cost
