With the progress of chemical synthesis technology, structurally modified brassinosteroids (BRs) with greater stability, under field conditions have been synthesized on a commercial scale and registered as plant growth regulators for specific horticultural crops. In both fundamental and application-oriented research, BRs and their analogues play prominent roles in various physiological processes including, seed development and germination, flower sex expression, fruit development, improvement of quantity and quality of crops, and resistance to various biotic and abiotic stresses. It is worthy to note here that the involvement of BRs in plant protection from adverse environmental stress and pesticides seems to have good prospects, since BRs appear nontoxic and environmentally friendly. It is well known that horticultural crops have a great variety of produce organs as well as high yield and output values. Moreover, their production is susceptible to sub-optimum environmental conditions, especially in facilities cultivation. Thus, practical application of BRs to horticultural crops for enhancing crops production and protection may have a promising prospect in the near future.

Maize is the one of the highest yielding cereals. Area under maize cultivation in the country, as well as in state of Odisha is gradually increasing due to its high economic benefits from maize. However, the benefits obtained by small and marginal farmers are comparatively less than the large ma ize farmers due to the use of traditional method of cultivation, use of conventional tools and machineries and small land holding. Most of the unit operations in maize are generally carried out manually which is labour intensive thereby increasing the cost of cultivation. Therefore, in this study a set of improved animal powered machineries and implements were demonstrated in maize cultivation in order to study the gain in net benefits by adopting small farm mechanization. The study revealed that small and marginal maize farmers of Gajapati districts could save up to Rs 7490/-per hectare using the improved bullock drawn implements and the B:C ratio has been increased up to 2.63 as compared to 2.08 in case of conventional maize farming.

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A field experiment was conducted in farmers' fields in village-Govindpur, Mohana, Gajapati district, Odisha where rice-green gram cropping system is the prevailing practice. For conservation agriculture point of view, performance evaluation of the CIAE bullock drawn 3 row seed drill under zero till condition was conducted for line sowing of green gram during Rabi season following kharif paddy and it was compared with conventional method of twice ploughing by local wooden plough followed by manual broadcasting of green gram seeds. Performance evaluation of OUAT bullock drawn mb plough, OUAT bullock drawn puddler and OUAT bullock drawn 8 row drum seeder was conducted for line sowing of pre-germinated paddy seeds during kharif season which was compared with conventional random transplanting method for wet land paddy cultivation.The overall performance CIAE seed drill with zero till tynes was superior to the conventional method considering the higher yield and B:C ratio and lesser labour requirement along with plant growth parameters.Considering the plant growth parameters and yield parameters and cost of operation the bullock drawn drum seeder was found superior to conventional random transplanting method.