Maize cultivation gets popularity now-a-days in Bangladesh because of\nmultifarious use of maize as human food and especially in the poultry industries.\nMaize is cultivated manually which is time consuming, labor intensive and costly.\nA low cost manually operated push type maize planter was designed, developed\nand tested in the testing bed of the department of Farm Power and Machinery,\nBangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh which reduces these problems.\nThe maize planter consists of two runner wheels, a seed hopper, an inclined plate\ntype seed metering device, a seed tube, a pair of bed former and handle. Power is\ntransmitted from the runner wheel to the metering device through bevel gear\nmechanism. UniGreen (NK-41) hybrid maize seeds were used to test the planter.\nThe planter was calibrated in the lab to maintain the desired seed rate of 25-30\nkg/ha. In the laboratory test, the effective field capacity, field efficiency, average\ndistance of dropped seed, plant population and missing rate were found as 0.128\nha/hr, 76.5%, 22.5 cm, 8 plants/m2,and 13.43% respectively for first maize\nplanter. The operational cost of the first maize planter was achieved as 410\nTk/ha whereas in manual planting of maize it is 5250 Tk/ha, thus the planter\nmay save about 92% cost for maize establishment. The pushing force of the\nmaize planter was 90 N, which is quiet low to operate by a female person. The\nmachine might be acceptable since it is easy to operate, simple in design and\nmechanism, light in weight, requires less labor and cost of planting after further\ntrial in the farmer�s field.
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