Complete set of CAD drawings
“Earth Links Featured SRI Equipment: Dryland Multi-Crop Wheeled Weeder”
Modifications to Multi-Crop Weeder
“Earth Links Featured SRI Equipment: Dryland Multi-Crop Wheeled Weeder”
This weeder was designed and developed by:
- Konda Babu of M R College, Vizianagaram, Andhra Pradesh, India and
- Govinda Rao of ANGR Agricultural University, Agricultural College, Naira, Andhra Pradesh, India
Their study is published in International Journal for Modern Trends in Science and Technology and contains detailed design information for their project: Measurements, materials and purpose of chosen materials for optimum performance.
“Manually Operated Dry Land Weeder: A Study”
Our work at Earth Links has been to support resource limited smallholder rice farmers around the world who are using the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), specifically by providing them with better access to labor-saving, injury reducing low-cost tools. They are better enabled with improved equipment to take advantage of the opportunities that SRI can give them to provide food security through increased yields and more economic stability.
Over 25 Million small-holder farmers have adopted a method of growing rice that involves ‘planting with space’. SRI is a sustainable, agroecological and proven set of 4 main agronomic principles:
- Early and healthy plant establishment
- Reduced plant density with single seedlings in a grid pattern
- Improved soil conditions through enrichment with organic matter
- Reduced and controlled water application with alternating wetting and drying of fields
These principles and associated practices, when combined, use less water, less seed and less or no chemical inputs while producing more rice and increasing incomes.
SRI and Climate Change:
Rice is the nutritious staple crop for more than half of the world’s people, but conventional methods of flooded paddies for growing rice, produce methane, because the water prevents oxygen from penetrating the soil which creates the perfect growing conditions for bacteria that emit methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide. Methane from rice contributes around 1.5 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. SRI is a proven factor in the reduction of methane emissions, because it eliminates the man-made wetlands of flooded rice paddies. Project Drawdown has placed SRI in the top 35 of their climate solutions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions
For more comprehensive information about the System of Rice Intensification, go to the site of our partner, SRI-Rice at Cornell University. They are the leading research and resource site for SRI in the world.
http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/