ABSTRACT

Harvesting of ginger rhizomes in Nigeria is done manually by the use of fork, axe, spade and other farm implements. A tractor driven two row ginger harvesting machine was designed and fabricated. The developed two row ginger harvester consists of shafts, pulley, collector, PTO shaft, gear reducer, diggers, rake, and conveyor. After fabrication, the harvester was tested using six tractor forward speeds of 4km/h, 8km/h, 12km/h, 16km/h, 20km/h and 24km1h respectively to check the effect of tractor forward speeds on the material efficiency and damage index of the harvester. A Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with Analysis of Variance was used to design the experiments. From the results, the damage index reduces as the speed reduced from 0.96 to 0.25. The material efficiency increases as the speed decreases from 88.00% to 52.33%. The highest material efficiency was obtained at the speed of 4km/hr while the lowest was obtained at the speed of 24km/h. The results showed that the lowest speed of 4km1hr has the highest value on material efficiency of 88.00% and the speed of 24km/h has the lowest value of 52.33% while the speed of 8km/h has the lowest damage index of 0.25 and the highest value of 0.96 was obtained at the speed of 24km/h. The p-value on material efficiency is 0.000134, while the damage index is 0.000253, which is less than 5% probability showing that the test is significant (P<0.05).