Need for automation in vegetable transplanter for Indian agriculture

Abstract

Vegetable transplanting is very tedious and labour intensive operation. In India, it is generally done traditionally, i.e. by manually placing seedlings at specified distance and depth. Recent developments in the area of automatic and semi-automatic type vegetable transplanters have shown increased avenues of mechanization possibilities in vegetable cultivation in Indian agriculture. By considering practical use of vegetable transplanting mechanism, it can be concluded that semiautomatic mechanism should be replaced with automatic mechanism due to lower field capacity as well as field efficiency of semi-automatic transplanters. The lower field capacities in semi-automatic
transplanter are due to limitations on manual feeding rates of seedling which vary with respect to time and skill of the operator. This article is aimed to highlight the developments in the area of automation in vegetable cultivation in Indian agriculture. It also highlights the need to develop an automatic vegetable transplanter for commercial use to enhance the work output.