THIRUVANANTHAPURAM : Wheel Hoe Weeder, a manually operated push-type machinery for weeding, designed and developed by Department of Agronomy, College of Agriculture, Vellayani, under Kerala Agricultural University has been granted patent by the Government of India for 10 years from July 2021. The machinery that lets the operator avoid bending over to pull out the weeds can easily be operated by women for weeding in inter-row spaces of row-planted crops.
An operator using the machinery, with weeding blade of sweep size 20 cm attached to it, can weed an area of 0.015 ha (3.7 cents ) in an hour on loamy soil. The machinery is operated by pushing action through force exerted by operator on the handle bar with grips, which allows the weeding blade to penetrate into the soil, skim below the ground surface and cut or uproot the weeds in between the crop rows. Soil mass to a depth of 1.5 cm can be manipulated by the machinery during operation.
The weeding blade is attached to headpiece such that the weeding blade is slanted to an angle of 15 degrees to the horizontal while the headpiece remains vertically attached to the chassis. This design is incorporated so that weeding blade can easily penetrate soil with least resistance.
This design also provides the operator with more direct and accurate control over the soil working part of the weeding blade. The chassis has provision to attach weeding blades of varying sweep sizes as per crop inter row space requirement.
The Wheel Hoe Weeder has been developed as a part of a doctoral/post graduate research programme of Seethal Rose Chacko, Dhanu Unnikrishnan, Krishnasree R K and Anitrosa Innazent under the guidance of Dr Sheeja K Raj, Dr Jacob D and Dr Shalini Pillai P, Department of Agronomy, College of Agriculture, Vellayani.
Advantages
An operator using the machinery, with weeding blade of sweep size 20 cm attached to it, can weed an area of 0.015 ha (3.7 cents ) in an hour on loamy soil. The machinery lets the operator avoid bending over to pull out the weeds.