Development of a Single Row Potato Hiller for Mountainous Farming Regions
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Abstract
Hilling potato farms require a lot of labor, tedious work, and time-consuming tasks. It requires at least 10 man-days to complete manual hilling of a hectare farm. It also does not guarantee uniform quality due to the human factor that may result in some potatoes being improperly hilled. This study was performed to develop and evaluate the performance of a singlerow potato hiller for small-scale mountainous farming areas in terms of its field capacity, field efficiency, hilling efficiency, fuel consumption, and percentage damage on the potato crop. Three different moldboard designs were used in the field test of the machine: conventional moldboard, moldboard with curved top, and moldboard with curved top and soil carrier. The performance evaluation revealed that the moldboard with a curved top and soil carrier performed favorably with an actual field capacity of 234 m2/hr, field efficiency of 80%, hilling efficiency of 77%, 0% damage on the crop, and fuel consumption of 1.81 L/hr. In comparison with manual hilling, the performance of the machine is lower in terms of hilling efficiency since farmers always make sure that potato plants are properly hilled (100%) in manual hilling. However, the machine performs the work faster compared to the 107 m2/hr manual hilling capacity. With the result of this study, the developed potato hiller for sloping and mountainous potato farms is not ready to replace manual hilling yet, but it has the potential for further enhancement, specifically the moldboard design. Designers and researchers may consider the result of this study for further development to help ease the burden of potato farmers on the laborious, tedious, and time-consuming potato crop production.
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References
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