An improved IAR sorghum thresher

Abstract

Nigeria is the one of the major sorghum producing countries in the world with annual yield over Six million tons, however, threshing and cleaning of sorghum have remain serious problems to farmers due to high drudgery involve in traditional method. This shows that a little mechanization exist in post- harvest operation of such crop and affect the production. To address such problems, IAR sorghum thresher was developed at the Institute for Agricultural Research (IAR) Samaru, Zaria. Complete randomize design was used as the experimental design with three replications. The effect of the independent variable on the dependent variables was determined using ANOVA. The results showed that the moisture content is highly significance on the threshing and cleaning efficiency while their interaction was not significance at the same probability level (0.05). It was also observed that moisture content, feed rate and speed are highly significance on the throughput capacity, mechanical grain damage and scatter losses. Similarly all their interaction between the factor show similar effect.