Chorao Farmers Club tests Agriculture Machinery

The Chorao Farmers Club, will be testing the feasibility of mechanised paddy productionin order to evaluate the usefulness and cost effectiveness of an 8-row paddy transplanter on a test plot in Chorao island.

With support from The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and NABARD and under the guidance of the Department of Agriculture and the Krishi Vigyan Kendra, the Chorao Farmers Club will be transplanting paddy seedling using a transplanter on Monday 20th July.

The members of the Chorao Farmers Club, who have a high dependence on rice cultivation, have been dogged by labour availability problems in recent years. The shortage in labour availability coupled with increasingly high labour costs have been contributing to the retardation of agriculture in the state. The use of the paddy transplanter is expected to significantly reduce the labour cost required (by upto 50%) during the transplanting of paddy seedlings from the nursery into the fields – which is one of the largest components of overall labour costs in the cultivation of paddy. The chart below shows this activity makes up about 31% of the total operative costs of paddy production when labour is hired. This also cuts down the time required for the transplanting process by over 90%.

Source: Chorao Farmers Club experiment for the paddy season in 2008

In order to use this transplanter the main change required by a farmer is in the plantation of the nursery. Thick mats of seedlings need to be developed in what is known as a ‘Dapog Nursery’. These can be compared with the ‘tiles’ of fine grass available for planting lawns. Specific sized seedling-tiles are fed into the transplanter, which can plant 8 rows in one go, and there is a predetermined distance at which clumps of 5-7 seedlings will be pulled out from the ‘tile’ and transplanted. Typically, this transplanter can cover 1 acre (approximately 4,000 sq.mts) in two hours.