Design, Development, and Evaluation of a Belt Metering Device for Potato Planter

Potato ranks 4th in terms of production volume among various agricultural products after wheat, rice and corn. Potato planters, usually plant seed potatoes at a constant distance regardless of their size which leads to a heterogeneous distribution of stems at field. The main aim of this research was to design, develop and evaluate a special potato belt metering device. Belt planters use a group of belts to receive, deliver and plant potatoes. In this type of planters, the potatoes first fall from the hopper onto the middle of the planting belts. Return belts move in the opposite direction and guide the extra potatoes to the beginning of the path to be used for reloading by the middle belts. In this study, the evaluation of the metering device was performed in the laboratory with the use of a test rig. A factorial experiment conducted in a completely randomized design with 3 replicates to investigate the effect of the forward speed of planting belts and test rig, potato sizes and potato shapes on the mean planting distance, standard deviation, multiple planting index, miss and quality of feed indices and the accuracy. Results indicated that the mean seed spacing, standard deviation, multiple planting index, miss and quality of feed indices were significantly depend on the planting belts and test rigs forward speeds, potato size and shape. With the increase in the forward speed of the test rig, the mean seed spacing and miss index increased by 4.21 and 17.69%, respectively , while the amount of reduction in the feeding quality and multiple planting index were equal to 7.78 and 10%, respectively.