The conventional method of soil filling into nursery trays before seeding is known to be the most inexpensive approach prior to planting vegetables. However, this activity is very labourious and time-consuming if the operation is meant for high volume seeding. This study is done to develop soil-dispensing machine, evaluate its performance and to compare with traditional practice of soil filling into the nursery tray. The optimization of each parameter is also evaluated to obtain the exact volume of soil to fill the nursery tray to the fullest. A low-cost soil dispensing machine is developed in MARDI and it is using locally materials available in the market. The structure of the machine is fabricated using mild-steel and stainless-steel at the less cost. The machine consists of a conveyor, nursery tray holder, soil dispenser, scrapper, soil compactor, wiper motors, gears, microcontroller and sensors. There are three factors with two levels involve in this test; hopper angle, conveyor speed and auger speed. The hopper angles are evaluated at 45° and 65° while conveyor speeds are tested at 19 cm/s and 21 cm/s. The minimum and maximum speed of auger selected is 3.5 cm/s and 4.5 cm/s, respectively. Manual filling of soil into seedling tray was compared with filling soil using semi-automatic operated soil-dispenser. The results indicated that the model is significant with p-value <0.0001. Conveyor speed, auger speed and hopper angle were significant on the volume of soil dispensed with both speeds shows a p-value <0.0001, while hopper angle shows p-value equal to 0.00112. The combination of both speeds greatly affected the response with p-value <0.0001. There is no interaction between each speed and the hopper angle. From the optimization analysis, the operating conveyor speed, auger speed and angle of hopper should be set at 19.0 cm/s, 4.5 cm/s and 65° to discharge 2912 cm3 soil. In order to dispense 1190 cm3 of soil, conveyor speed, auger speed and hopper angle should be set at 21 cm/s, 4.3 cm/s and 50°. The result indicated that the machine can complete the seeding and soil filling process within 1 min per tray, while manual process took five minutes to complete the whole seeding process.

Manual activity in maize seeding shows an awkward posture due to repetitive movement on walking forward, body lowering, knee bending, squatting, digging, and seed sowing, which can cause body tiring. These are the symptom of human fatigue or the ergonomic hazard in an agricultural field, leading to Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSD) if done repeatedly and extended for a long time. The paper explained the ergonomic evaluation of seeding risk assessment using two methods; bare hand and lightweight motorized maize seeder. The evaluated maize seeder was designed with a minimum number of parts to make the assembly and maintenance requirements easy without affecting the functionality of the metering device. The maize seeder is easy to operate, light to carry, and convenient to use with a single-handed griper to improve ergonomics in the field. Using the concept of gravitational drop and the battery to power the motor, the farmer experiences a slightly bent body position with a relaxed posture that requires less stressful angles on seeding activity. Seeding postures on methods were evaluated using Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA) and Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA) to determine the area of bodily discomfort. The RULA result shows that the ergonomic risk score on manual seeding activity was at score 7, which is high risk compared to seeding activity using the maize seeder, which results in a score of 4 that shows a low risk.In comparison, the REBA result shows a high risk on manual seeding with a score of 11 and a low risk on seeding with a seeder, which is in score 3—seeding by bare hand, adopting poor posture at the neck, trunk, and wrist twist. The work rate for seeding maize using the conventional method and seeder was 0.114 m/s and 0.167 m/s, respectively. The study concludes that using the lightweight motorized maize seeder can reduce the risks of MSDs due to working in an awkward posture in sowing maize on the field.

This article reports on the performance and costs of owning and operating a pedestrian-type low land cabbage transplanting machine. The tests were carried out on tin-tailing soil at MARDI Kundang Research Station. They were undertaken in view of the need to mechanize low land cabbage transplanting operation due to shortage of agricultural labor. The machine performed satisfactorily when operated on planting bed with or without the existence of the plastic mulch. Cabbage seedlings required bigger holes on the planting bed which is layered with plastic mulch in order to avoid mortality of seedlings due to the heat absorbed by the plastic. Based on the performances test, the results showed that the field efficiency were 91.36% and 92.21% for with and without plastic mulch respectively on the planting bed. On average, 407s were recorded for the machine to transplant the seedlings along 100m planting bed. Compared with the traditional method, the transplanter could give 82-85% saving in labor required to plant the seedlings. The calculated break-even annual use for the implement was 33 ha/year. The implement was projected to be viable to use for 1600 h/year.Keywords: low land cabbage; transplanter; machine performance; work rate, viability