Development and Performance Evaluation of A Hand-Pushed Pesticides Sprayer

Abstract

Insect, pest and weeds that competes with crops are challenges in crop production systems in Nigeria that results the reduction of both qualitative and quantitative value of the crop yield. A hand-push wheel operated pesticide sprayer was design and developed in the Crop Protection Unit of the Department of Agricultural and Bio-Resources Engineering, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. This is to overcome such challenges of the leaver-operated knapsack sprayer that has been the most common technique for applying pesticides in order to suppress such unwanted pests. The components of the developed sprayer include a 16 L plastic tank, a guide wheel, frame, fluid delivery hose and four nozzles attached to an adjustable beam with height depending on the crop height. Laboratory and the field evaluations of the developed sprayer were conducted to determine the spray flow rate, spray volume distribution pattern, swath width, spray overlap, theoretical and field capacities, efficiency and application rate using cone nozzles. Results obtained from laboratory and field trials shows that the pesticide sprayer has an average flow rate that varies from 0.586 to 0.641 L/min with an average swath width of 3.83 m. The results also shows that the sprayer has an average effective field capacity of 1.15 ha/h and field efficiency of 96.65%. Its spray overlap ranged between 30.27 – 31.08 % while the coefficient of variation was 1.46 %, indicating that the variability of spray overlap between adjacent nozzles were in good uniformity. The developed sprayer also consumes less application time at reduce drudgery as the users pushes the sprayer with minimum effort. This makes it suitable for pesticides application for small- and medium farmers.