Performance Evaluation of Digger for Ginger Crop

The ginger (Zingiber officinale) rhizome is harvested manually by different types of spade, fork or bullock drawn plow. These methods consume more time, cause drudgery, losses and low field capacity. Therefore a tractor drawn digger was evaluated for ginger crop. The performance parameters (exposed, cut, bruised and digging efficiency) of the digger were studied at 3 forward speeds and 3 blade angles. The performance of the digger was found satisfactory in respect of digging efficiency of 98.01%, and undug crop of 2.38 % at an average depth of operation of 15.75 cm. The damage was 1.98 per cent which was much low as compared to manual digging of ginger crop (9.73%). The machine takes 7.4 hours to dig one-hectare area of ginger crop with field efficiency of 87.82%.