This study contains the design approach, development details, and field evaluation of an innovative tractor-operated seeder for sowing mat type paddy nursery. In order to design and select the various components of mat type nursery seeder, the fundamentals of farm machinery design were taken into due consideration. The machine comprises of soil cutting unit, inclined conveyor unit, screw type conveyor auger, sieving unit, compaction roller, polythene sheet laying unit, soil metering and seed metering unit. The basic criteria for design were to prepare a soil bed with a width of 1000 mm and width of cut of channel 240 mm on both sides of the bed to irrigate the prepared soil bed. The soil cutting unit and conveyor unit were designed based upon amount of soil required on soil bed to have 20–30 mm soil mat bed thickness and seed metering unit was designed to deliver 2–3 seeds∙cm⁻² on the bed. The machine was fabricated based on design calculations and then evaluated in laboratory as well as actual field conditions. During field evaluation of this machine, it was found that the coefficient of uniformity for seed spread was 7.33%, coefficient of uniformity for soil spread 5.67%, fuel consumption 39.6 l.ha⁻¹ and actual field capacity 0.11 ha∙h⁻¹ with 1.7 km∙h⁻¹ forward speed of machine. Labour saving using the designed tractor-operated seeder was observed to be 86.4% as compared to the manual method of sowing mat type nursery using steel frames.

This computer application deals with energy auditing for rice-wheat cropping system. Computing different input parameters for the crop production system in terms of energy requirement (MJ/ha) can be done by using this computer application. The developed application was found to be a simple, easy and user-friendly with appropriate output units. It works efficiently and gives the desired output in terms of energy consumption (MJ/ha). The advantage of this application is to decide the inputs on the basis of energy consumption before performing actual cultivation practice using the last season data. Moreover, using this package energy budget difference and comparison of subsequent production seasons can be achieved. The computer application was developed using Visual Basic, which allows the user to calculate total energy use efficiency, specific energy and different energy ratios in a particular cropping system.

Mat-type nursery having uniform growth is a prerequisite for mechanized paddy transplanting. Generally, this type of nursery is sown manually in the open field or in trays. It requires several simultaneous operations and hence is laborious and time-consuming. The performance of tractor-operated mat-type nursery seeder was evaluated at the Research Farm of Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, Punjab during 2019–20 with an objective to obtain the finest speed of operation to get the uniform seed and soil spread. Study was carried out on three different types of soil (sandy loam, loam and silt loam) for three different forward speeds (1.7, 2.2 and 2.7 km/h). Results have shown that the soil type had a non-significant effect on the performance of the machine, whereas forward speed had significant (P<0.05) effect. In overall, with an increase in forward speed of the machine, there was a reduction in uniformity for both seed and soil spread. The best results were obtained at a forward speed of 1.7 km/h with the overall seed spread of 90.93%, overall soil mat thickness 99.70%, fuel consumption 4.36 l/h and effective field capacity 0.092 ha/h. Therefore, the developed tractor-operated seeder can be operated on sandy loam to silt loam soils with a forward speed of 1.7 km/h with 59.5% saving in cost and 62.6% saving in labour for sowing mat type nursery as compared to manual method with MS frames.