The planting of garlic was still no

The planting of garlic was still not mechanized due to the lack of appropriate planting, cultivation and harvesting machinery. Hence the crop is grown in relatively small fields by using traditional methods, which, requires about 60 to 65 mendays for sowing one hectare and costing around Rs. 5,200/ ha. In this study an innovatively designed self propelled precision garlic planter capable of planting three rows of garlic cloves at a spacing of 10 x 15 cm was designed, fabricated and tested. It is developed in the workshop of Department of Farm Machinery and Power Engineering, CAE, JNKVV, Jabalpur. The theoretical seeding rate and seeding mass rate was calculated to 6,66,667 cloves/ha and 0.573 t/ha by taking crop geometry of 10 x 15 cm. Auto-CAD design and drawing was used for the fabrication of the machine. The overall length x width x height of the machine is 1,937 x 620 x 922 mm. Twelve elliptical spoons having 180 fitted in round plate of diameter 200 mm were used for metering of cloves. A 3 hp diesel engine was used as prime mover of the garlic planter. The theoretical field capacity (TFC) was calculated as 0.081ha/h, at a speed of 1.8 km/h, whereas, the actual field capacity (AFC) was found to be 0.065 ha/h with field efficiency of 79.84 %. It was observed that the placement of garlic cloves were at uniform depth under a range 4.2 cm to 5.2 cm with a minimum SD and CV of 0.33 cm and 6.92 % respectively. The miss index, multiple index and seed damage was found to be only 2.67, 8.0 and 1.46 % respectively, which was within acceptable limit Operating cost per hour of the machine was calculated as Rs.151.00/h. For sowing one ha of land the planter required Rs. 2,321.50 /ha which was much more less as compared to manual dibbling method which required 65 man days and required additional of Rs. 2,878.00. Thus, the newly developed machine saves 55.35 % of money over traditional methods.