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Experiment Background
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Banana is globally ranked fourth, next to rice, wheat and maize in terms of gross value of production. In India banana is one of the major and economically important crop, the second largest growing fruit crops after mango, occupy 20 per cent area among the total area under crop. Banana crop require large amounts of mineral nutrients to maintain high crop yields in commercial plantations. Intensive use of inorganic fertilisers is essential to supply sufficient nutrients to the plants, especially in areas with the problem of nutrient deficiency. The market price for inorganic granular fertilisers is high and its continuous usage can cause environmental pollution. Foliar fertilisers can be an appropriate alternative to reduce the usage of inorganic granular fertilisers. During vegetative growth, plants require well-balanced nutrition in order to achieve high yields and quality of produce (House and Welch, 1989). Kumar and Kumar (2007) reported that spraying foliar fertiliser at the reproductive stage of the banana would increase the number of leaves having high chlorophyll content and improve fruit bunch weight. Foliar fertiliser application at the vegetative stage (before the reproductive stage) may lead to better growth of banana crop (Devkate et al. 2018 and Nandan etal. 2011).
Banana crop are planted at higher spacing in between row and plant (2m × 1.8 m), and plant size is too small (20 cm plant height and 5 cm stem diameter) during early growth stage. So, fertilizer has to apply in different splits during this vegetative growth. Most of farmers are spraying of fertilize/chemical as well as other intercultural operation doing by mini four-wheel tractor or power tiller. In vegetative phase of crop, much amount of fertilizer wastage done due to size and plant spacing. If fertilizers spray on plant canopy, it can, the amount, cost, and pollution, and thus improve the input use efficiency for banana production.
Advances in sensors have contributed in the use of automation for agriculture machinery generally, and for spraying and weeding machines specifically. With automation, the spraying is operated electronically which reduces human intervention and optimizes the power provided by the machine. Automatic machines also offer the possibility to identify banana plant on field, at the same time and spraying the fertilizer on the plant with a precisely controlled device. The measurement of crop structure has been simplified by the development of a range of non-invasive optical and ultrasonic sampling techniques. In particular, the development of a compact, tractor-mounted light detection and range system has made it possible to take quick and detailed readings of crop structure (Wangler et al. 1993). These are suitable for computational processing to calculate a wide range of summary parameters based on a probability interpretation of light transmission and crop interception characteristics (Walklate et al. 2002). Gil et al. (2007) and Tewari et al. (2018) uses ultrasonic sensors and proportional solenoid valves with the corresponding software and microcontroller system for automation, which allowed real time modification of the sprayed flow rate adapted to the tree canopy. Even though, much research has been done on orchard tree, but still there is no information foliar allocation of fertilizer on banana crops. Looking this importance of automatic sprayer, present project entitled “Design and development of automatic plant target fertilizer sprayer for banana crop” is planned with following.
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