Published in Scientific Papers. Series "Management, Economic Engineering in Agriculture and rural development", Vol. 22 ISSUE 4
Written by Tarek FOUDA, Adel ABDRABO, Hamada MORGAN, Mohamed I. El DIDAMONY, Shimaa SALAH

Mechanical transplanting of rice is considered one of the safest methods of rice cultivation. It is also one of the most desirable methods for Egyptian farmers, saving about 70% of the seeds, saving labor costs, better plant density, water saving, and weed control. Due to the fragmentation of agricultural holdings in Egypt and the high costs of mechanical transplanting with imported machines, the research aimed to manufacture a rice transplanting machine with local materials suitable for small rice holdings and achieve the technical recommendations of Egyptian conditions. Also, testing and evaluating the manufactured machine under different operation conditions. The rice transplanting machine was manufactured and tested at the Rice Mechanization Center, Agricultural Engineering Research Institute, Egypt. The machinecontains five rows and the distance between each row is 20 cm. The manufactured transplanter was tested and evaluated under four different forward speeds (1.00, 1.25, 1.50, and 1.75 km/h), four different intra-row hill spacing (16, 18, 20, and 22 cm), and two seedling cross-section area (1.00 and 2.00 cm²). The obtained results indicated that the lowest percentages of missing, floating, and damaged hills were 2.92, 1.83, and 0.27%, respectively.The highest transplanting efficiency and field efficiency were94.98 and 83.75%, respectively, obtained at themachine forward speed of 1.00 km/h, intra-row hill spacing of 22 cm, and seedling cross-section area of 2.00 cm². Also, the lowest value of requirement energy was 4.599 kW.h/fed, which achieved the highest actual field capacity of 0.285 fed/h obtained at forward speed of 1.75 km/h, intra-row hill spacing of 22 cm, and seedling cross-section area of 1.00 cm².

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