Here’s Everything You Need to Know about Tractor Driven Onion Transplanter

Manually transplanting onion seedlings is a time-consuming, labor-intensive procedure. Onions can be grown from seed or transplants. Transplanted seedlings produced larger bulbs than directly sown seeds (more than 5 cm in diameter).

Let's Knw About the Tractor-Driven Onion Transplanter

Reasons to Use a Tractor-Driven Onion Transplanter

It is difficult to maintain straight rows in the traditional method of planting, which is a barrier in mechanical weeding. However, this machine makes mechanical weeding easier, lowering weeding costs. It can cover one hectare (2.5 acres) per day with a driver and four workers. This is better than the 0.05 hectare per day coverage achieved by conventional methods with the same number of people. With a cost of Rs 1000 per hectare, this machine saves his region's transplantation costs by 80%.

Furthermore, in the traditional method of onion planting, 40 people transplant approximately 1,70,000 to 1,90,000 seedlings per acre, whereas this machine can transplant 2,25,000 seedlings per acre. Mechanical harvesting of onions becomes easier with this machine after transplanting because of the uniform furrow and spacing. This also results in uniform bulb size, which commands a high market price.

The machine eliminates the inaccuracy, drudgery, low yield, and high labor costs associated with manual planting, and it can also be used to sow cereal and pulse seeds.

Disc type furrow openers, mechanical planters with spot planting mechanism through spot holes, runner type furrow opener, mechanical seedling transplanter with the electronically controlled system, mechanical transplanters with roto-till or mini-mulcher unit in dual row arrangements, and a few others are available.

The functioning of a 4-Row Tractor-Drawn Automatic Transplanter

The tractor-drawn automatic onion transplanter covered four rows at a time in the 400-mm-wide soil bed created by the Ridger.
The feeding tray of onion seedlings was placed on the conveying belt, which moved at a speed of 0.30 m/s using power from a ground wheel drive to propel the paper pot chain forward.
By cutting the paper pot chain and conveying it to the furrow via a seedling delivery tube, the onion transplanter was able to transplant four pots at the same time.
Using a Geneva mechanism, the belt's rotational speed was made intermittent.
There was a cutting unit with a rotating cutter and a vertical blade for cutting along and across the row to get single pots from the chain of paper pots.

Transplanting onion seedlings requires more labor and takes more time, so farmers prefer broadcasting seeds, which results in low bulb yield and poor bulb quality. Given the various issues identified in the mechanization of onion cultivation, particularly the labor required during the peak period of onion transplanting, the development of an automatic onion transplanter is required. As a result, an attempt was made to design and develop an automatic onion transplanter drawn by a tractor.