Development Of Mat Nursery Raising And Uprooting Techniques For Paddy (Oryza Sativa L.) Crop And Their Field Evaluation With Mechanical Transplanter For South East Asia

The increasing wages, shortage of labour, marginal profits to farmers are increasing in paddy cultivation as well as in other agricultural crops in South East Asia. Mechanization of raising and transplanting operation of paddy seedlings are the solutions to these problems. This study aims at developing a mat type nursery raising and uprooting techniques for paddy crop so as to suit commercially available mechanical transplanter. Three different mat type nursery treatments were raised on 60 gauge perforated polythene sheet and with three different sources of irrigation involving drip (T-1), sprinkler (T-2) and flood irrigation system (T-3). The other treatments of nursery were raised on field soil only (T-5), mush- room waste material as soil filling on polythene sheet (T-6), on wheat straw (T-4), paddy straw (T-7), chopped paddy straw (T-8), and cloth paper (T-9) as a separator instead of polythene sheet, all using soil as nursery raising material using flood irrigation system. Different nursery uprooting techniques were applied. A manual nursery cutter was also developed and used for uprooting treatments T-4 and T-5. Nursery treatments T-1, T2, T3 and T-4 were manually uprooted after making a cut in soil with sickle. The uprooted mats were transplanted in puddle field condition using six row four wheel drive paddy transplanter. The mean paddy grain yield was highest in treatment T, followed by T-5 which gave values of 3,129.09 kg.acre(-1) and 2,922.98 kg.acre(-1), respectively. Out of flood, sprinkler and drip irrigation systems, the flood irrigation treatment on polythene sheet (T-3) recorded the highest grain yield value of 2,833.08 kg.acre(-1). The benefit-cost ratio was highest in treatment T-4 (wheat straw + soil) with a value of 1.92 and for treatment T-5 (field soil only) it was 1.80. The use of field soil as base material for raising mat type nursery with flood irrigation system increased the paddy grain yield when compared with the treatments raised on polythene sheet and uprooting with manual nursery cutter proved to be a more economical and comfortable uprooting technique when compared with other treatments.