Bio Fertilizer on Rachis: A New Method Facilitates Higher Banana (<em>Musa sapientum</em>) Production

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Due to huge demand and availability of Banana, innovative cost effective method is necessary to promote and smoothen the banana production among farmers commercially mitigating the demand. Method and Materials: In this study, we feed cow dung mixture along with Urea, TSP, MoP, water to the distal part of rachis after cutting down male bud as soon as the female flowers matured into fruits (T1). The effect of this method was then compared with two control groups; one with the same strategy except fertilizer applied on root following ring method (C1, Positive control) and another was male flower untouched without applying fertilizer on rachis or root (C2, Negative control). Results and Conclusion: T1 showed more than double increase in length than controls. In the same way, in case of shape (diameter), T1 (0.46 cm) showed twice as better growth in the C1 (0.22 cm) and C2 (0.18 cm). Trend analysis showed the test group T1 curve is much steeper than the control groups suggesting faster growth rate than the other two. Finally, the cost of fertilizers for T1 per plant was estimated 0.091 USD while for positive control C1 it was 2.9 USD. This study shows an approach to be effective and economic comparing to traditional method of fertilizer application, which can be adapted as a new method of banana production.

A Method of Fast Segmentation for Banana Stalk Exploited Lightweight Multi-Feature Fusion Deep Neural Network

“…(2) In the decoding network, the dilated convolution with different expansion rates is adopted for feature fusion, so that the banana stalk features are denser and decoding can be realized more effectively. (3) The quantitative analysis of five different networks shows that the proposed network model Sandglass_MFN has good performance. In a complex orchard environment, the banana stalk can be segmented effectively.…”

“…According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, currently there are 137 countries and regions planting banana, and the banana production is still rising [1][2][3]. In 2016, the world's total banana production reached 1113.23 million tons.…”