Non-puddled mechanical rice seedling transplanting

Shortage and increased cost of labor is forcing farmers to look for alternatives to traditional puddling of soil and manual transplanting of rice. Development of riding type rice transplanter for unpuddled transplanting by incorporating strip-tillage mechanism could decrease costs and use of labor as well as improve the transplanting performance. A study was conducted to evaluate the rice transplanter under different tillage and soil conditions at the research farm and on farmers’ field during Boro and Aman seasons. Unpuddled tillage treatments were: shallow beds (BT) strip-tillage (ST) zero tillage (ZT) which was compared with puddled conventional tillage (CT). Another study was also conducted to evaluate the rice transplanter at research farm and on farmers’ field under different tillage options and varied inundation period during Boro seasons.