Development and evaluation of manually operated vegetable transplanter for smallholder farmers

Transplanting of vegetable seedlings with obsolete tools such as cutlasses and hoes is one of the greatest constraints to increasing vegetable production in Ghana. It makes the process slow, time consuming and tedious. A simple handheld vegetable transplanter that is affordable and compatible with the farming systems in Ghana was, therefore, designed, constructed and evaluated under local conditions for smallholder farmers. The construction of the handheld vegetable transplanter was done with local materials and technology. The constructed transplanter could transplant accurately at three different transplanting depths of 5 cm, 7.5 cm, and 10 cm. Field performance of the constructed transplanter was evaluated at three different transplanting depths. The results from field eval nation of the transplanted showed that, with transplanting at 5 cm depth, the mean field efficiency was 91 .05%, while at 7.5 cm depth 74.44% efficiency was recorded. Seedlings transplanted at depth 10 cm had the least field efficiency of 51.22% and also recorded the highest plant mortality of 10% afier 20 days of transplanting. From the study, it was realised that the optimum pepper seedlings transplanting depth using this transplanted range from 5 cm to 7.5 cm.