Design and Fabrication of a Manually Operated Rice Transplanter for Local Farmers

Abstract

Most local farmers who cultivate rice cannot afford the high cost of purchase of imported rice transplanter. The farmers mainly depend on manual hand transplanting method to transplant rice seedlings. This method is less efficient, and highly stressful for the local farmers to depend on to meet the growing demand of food in Nigeria. This work was based on the design and fabrication of a manually operated rice transplanter for local farmers using locally available materials. The design was modeled using Solidworks software (2019) and four bar linkage mechanism was used to achieve this project. The design was easy to fabricate, operate and maintain. It requires less labour stress and reduce or eliminate backache experienced by farmers during rice transplanting process compared to the traditional method. The cost of the manually operated four row transplanter was about N100,000, which is more affordable when compared with the imported transplanters that cost about N1,000,000 for a four-row motorized transplanter and N160,000 for a two row manually operated transplanter