Article Sidebar
Published:
Aug 30, 2020Keywords:
Article Details
NAJ supports free online communication and exchange of knowledge as the most effective way of ensuring that the fruits of research and development practice are made widely available. It is therefore committed to open access, which, for authors, enables the widest possible dissemination of their findings and, for readers, increases their ability to discover pertinent information. The Journal adopts and uses the CC: BY license and is open access. This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Copyright for articles published in this Journal is retained by the Journal.
Main Article Content
PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF A GINGER HARVESTING MACHINE
Abstract
In this study, experimental field trials were conducted at National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI),
Umudike, on a flat land with sandy clay loam soil, to evaluate the performance of the machine at two different
tractor forward speeds of 4km/h and 8km/h. The following field parameters were recorded: operation speeds,
number of ginger rhizomes harvested, number of un-harvested ginger, number of ginger rhizomes with cut,
effective/theoretical field capacity and efficiency. Harvesting of ginger rhizomes in Nigeria is done manually by
the use of fork, spade and other farm implements. A Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) was used to
design the experiment and analyses carried out with Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). From the results, the tractor
forward speed of 4km/h has the highest number of ginger rhizomes harvested at 88.7%, while the speed of 8km/h
has the highest number of un-harvested ginger at 31%, and number of ginger with cut at 33.7%. The harvester
gave a satisfactory performance as it was able to carry out harvesting operation of ginger, with the effective field
capacity, theoretical field capacity and field efficiency of 0.0261ha/h, 0.000505ha/h and 52% respectively.
