Design and development of a digging machine for turmeric and ginger crop

Abstract

The turmeric and ginger crop was harvested by different types of spade, fork or bullock drawn plow. These methods are very tedious and ergonomically not suitable for the human labour and that results high labour cost and more time and energy consumption for harvesting of the turmeric and ginger. Due to shortage of labour and high charges demands the mechanization in harvesting of these two crops. So a tractor operated digger was design and developed for harvesting of the turmeric and ginger crop, which could dig the crop and separate the fresh crop from soil in field. The digging efficiency of machine was found to be 98.01 and 97.76 % with the exposed percent of 86.42 and 85.93 for ginger and turmeric crop, respectively. The per cent decrease in cost of digging by digger in comparison to manual digging was found to be 69.53 and the break-even point of the digger was 57.59 hours per year. The payback period of root crop digger was less than one year.