Battery operated upland weeder: An economically viable and environmentally friendly weed management approach for sustainable crop production

Abstract

The goal of this work was to reduce the production cost and drudgery of labour in weeding purpose and use of renewable energy for upland crop production. Traditional weeding is common and most widely used weed control method, but it is labour-intensive. Adverse effects on the environment and cost of chemical weeding are making farmers to consider mechanical methods of weed control. Therefore, a battery-operated (BO) weeder was designed and fabricated considering methodological steps. For performance evaluation, field trials were done among BO weeder, BARI push and pull weeder, manual weeding and chemical weeding. The field trials were made on maize, chilli and eggplant at the research field of Farm Power Machinery and Post-Harvest Division (FPME), Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), Joydebpur, Gazipur, Bangladesh. The performance of BO weeder is quite acceptable for wide row crop. Weeding index of BO weeder for maize, chilli and eggplant were 92.52, 95.85 and 92.79%, respectively which is very close to chemical weeding. Again effective field capacity i.e., the area coverage of BO weeder for maize, chilli and eggplant were 0.04643, 0.02167, and 0.0463ha/hr, respectively. Plant damage ratio was varied limited for maize which was only 0.50% but it grows a little up to 2.8% for chilli and eggplant. Cost of weeding by BO weeder was almost half compared to BARI weeder and just about one-third compare to manual weeding but equivalent to chemical weeding. But no significant difference for yield was found among these three methods except eggplant. We found better yield in eggplant for battery weeder compared to other practices. Therefore, newly designed and fabricated BO upland weeder may be used as an economically viable, environmentally friendly and non-chemical weed management approach for sustainable crop production in the modern era of changing climate.