TITLE: Design and Fabrication of a Carabao-Pulled 2-RowMulti-Seeder

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The Philippines is still primarily an agricultural country despite the plan to make it an
industrialized economy by 2000. Most of the people still live in rural areas and support themselves
through agriculture. It involves about 40 percent of Filipino workers which contributes an average of 20
percent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Additionally, agriculture sector in the Philippines is made
up of four subs-sectors: fisheries, livestock, farming, and forestry. Rice, corn, coconut, sugarcane,
bananas, pineapple, coffee, mangoes, tobacco, and abaca are the country’s main agricultural crops. All
over the world, the Philippines export its agricultural products to United States, Japan, Europe, and
ASEAN countries.

More than half of the world’s population, rice is the staple food. Around 4 billion people depend
on rice as their source of food. In addition, about 90% of rice is grown in Asia which has more than 200
million rice farms. One of the major producers of rice in Asia is the Philippines which ranked as the 8 th
largest rice producer in the world contributing about 2.8 percent in supplying globally. Production of rice
in the Philippines has grown significantly through past decades. However, the demand for rice continues
to increase due to the inevitable growth of population. The basic stages of rice cultivation include seed
selection, land preparation, planting, water management, harvesting and post-harvest. Farming rice is one
of the laborious and hardest planting processes. To plant hectares of fields, it involves a huge amount of
workforce. However, the declining number of farmers in the country affected the production rate. In the
Philippines, the average age of farmers is about 57 years old (Saliot, 2013). Too much effort and
investment for most rice farmers is the reason why no young farmers tend to pursue this industry.

Through agricultural mechanization, rich countries intensified the production rate of their crops.
Some of these existing machineries help different agricultural sectors which were design to ease the labor
of the farmers and at the same time, it hasten the process. However, even though the efficiency of these
has been proven, there are still factors that the farmers need to consider such as high maintenance cost,
portability, and the price of machine itself. Most of the local farmers would rather be doing the
conventional way of farming than investing in such expensive machineries.

As time passed by, our population continues to increase and it is necessary that farmers must
produce more food. However, this can only be achieved through some level of mechanization. Most of the
farmer use traditional methods for sowing/ planting such as broadcasting and seed dropping behind the
plough, which effects germination due to the non-uniform placement of seeds at the proper depth.
Additionally, 47% of its total land in the Philippines is being used for producing agricultural products and
traditional planting is still being used in different parts of the country. Manual planting can results to back
pain for the farmers, poor planting efficiencies and low seed spacing quality which limits the size of field
that can be planted but modern methods are too costly for a small scale farmer. However, it is beyond to
the small holder farmers to have a planting machine or planter that is normally required to produce more
food. In addition, low productivity of the crop is the result when these small holder farmers still continue
to plant manually. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a low cost planter that will reduce tedium and
drudgery and enable small holder farmer to produce more foods and also environmental friendly. In the
study of Khan, Moses, and Kumar (2016) where Bamgboye and Mofolassayo (2006) was mentioned, they
developed a manually operated two-row Okra planter were the field efficiency and field capacity were
71.75% and 0.36 ha/hr while seed rate was 0.36kg/hr with a low average seed damage of 3.51%.
Additionally, at the University of Southern Mindanao Agricultural Research Center (USMARC)
developed a single and double row planters which within 6-8 hours can plant a hectare for single-row and
half so much time for double-row.

In this paper, the researchers decided to conduct a study on the design and fabrication of a carabao-
pulled two-row multi-seeder which aims to plant seeds of different varieties using a mechanism that
supports the local farmers especially in rural areas. The researchers will focus on the seeds of corn, mung
bean, and palay for evaluation. Several factors were considered such as but not limited to (1) land
preparation, (2) planting techniques, and (3) row spacing and (4) planter configuration efficiency. The
prototype will furrow, seed and cover the soil while being pulled by carabao directed by farmer like in
traditional plowing method. It will respond to precision in see spacing and farming efficiency but with a
maintenance that can be done so easily.