Manual transplanting, a pre-dominant practice in almost all the paddy growing areas in India, is laborious, burdensome, and has many expenses on raising, settling, and transplanting nursery. The transplanting process’s limitations motivated the replacement of conventional paddy transplanting methods. The study was divided into two phases. The first phase included laboratory testing of three levels of metering mechanisms, namely cell type (M1) with 10 cells grooved around a circular plate having a 13 cm diameter, inclined plate (M2) containing 24 U shaped cells provided on an 18 cm diameter plate, and fluted roller (M3) with 10 flutes on a 5 cm diameter shaft. The testing matrix included a missing index, multiple index, and seed damage with forward speeds (2.5, 3.0, and 3.5 km/h), and pre-germination levels of 24 h soaked (P1), 24 h pre-germinated (P2), and 36 h pre-germinated paddy seeds (P3)). The second phase included selecting the best combination obtained from the laboratory study and developing a new efficient planter for the puddled field. The inclined plate metering mechanism operating at 2.5 km/h for 24 h pre-germinated seeds was reported most efficient from the first phase. Therefore, a self-propelled 8-row planter equipped with an inclined plate metering mechanism having a row-to-row spacing of 22.5 cm was developed, fabricated, and evaluated in the puddled field. The designed planter was assessed on two different soils: sandy loom (ST1) and clay loom (ST2) and at two different hopper fill levels as ½ filled hopper (F1) and ¾ filled hopper (F2). The number of plants per square meter and hill-to-hill spacing was measured. The on-field evaluation revealed that the number of plants per square meter was non-significantly affected by the type of soil but was significantly affected by hopper fill.

Grains of legumes are affected considerably due to mechanical handling. Traditional threshing practices and operations are laborious and expensive. Timeliness is another important factor. Among legumes, pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan) has considerable potential for adoption by farmers provided some of the major operations such as threshing are mechanized. The present study was aimed at optimizing important operational parameters of a modified spike tooth type thresher and crop parameters influencing threshing of pigeonpea. The thresher consisted of a 562 mm long threshing cylinder of 362 mm diameter, two aspirators, a sieve and screen. Effect of four levels of cylinder peripheral speed (16.4, 18.2, 20.1 and 21.9 m/s) and three levels of crop feed rate (700, 850 and 1000 kg/h) was studied on grain breakage, cleaning and threshing efficiency. Cylinder speed of 18.2 m/s and feed rate of 1000 kg/h resulted in optimum threshing efficiency, cleaning efficiency, breakage and non-collectable losses of 99.56 per cent, 98.63 per cent, 0.68 per cent and 0.27 per cent, respectively.

Among all the food grains, Basmati rice (Oryza sativa) has significant export potential. At present, majority of harvesting and threshing of basmati is accomplished manually because of high quality of grain. Manual harvesting and threshing operation is quite costly and mostly done by hired labour, threshing cost and family labour. Labour in harvesting has become scarce due to industrialization. The commercially available machines for paddy harvesting and threshing are not suitable for basmati varieties because of relatively delicate nature. There is no data available regarding design and operational parameters for harvesting basmati with conventional combine harvester. Therefore, this study has been planned to study the effect of selected design and operational parameters of threshing mechanism of conventional combine harvester for basmati crop and to compare the performance with prevalent practice. Field evaluation of experiment was carried out to assess the influence of independent design variable i.e., arrangement of spikes (AS) and independent operational parameters namely concave clearance (CC) and cylinder speed (CS). The study was aimed to quantify various combining losses viz., extent of grain damage (visible and invisible), unthreshed and clean grain losses in straw walker at different arrangement of spikes, concave clearance and cylinder speed. Initial testing of conventional combine harvester on PUSA Basmati-1121 to reduce the visible as well invisible losses had been carried out at PAU Regional Research Station, Gurdaspur (Punjab) during the year 2017.