Evaluation of L-tines for soil disturbance during mechanised cassava harvesting

Manual harvesting of cassava consumes a lot of energy and time. Although, Nigeria is the largest producer of cassava in the world, harvesting is not mechanized. Over the years, researchers have worked extensively in an attempt to come up with effective cassava harvester. These research efforts include manual, semi-mechanized/mechanized methods. In this work, a pair of L-Tines was designed, fabricated from locally sourced materials and evaluated for performance in terms of soil disturbance in the cassava root zone during mechanized harvesting. Experiments were conducted under soil bin and field conditions. The L-Tines were attached to a tool bar of an implement carriage designed specially to fit into an outdoor soil bin. The depth of operation was varied five times at a constant speed of 0.67m/s. The depth of operation was varied from 0.25 m to 0.45 m at 0.05 m interval; and at three different spacing of 0.35 m, 0.45 m and 0.55 m in a 5x3x3 factorial experiment with three replicates. This amounted to 45 experimental runs for the soil bin experiment. The same experiment was repeated in the field. Results indicated that there is a positive relationship between L-tine spacing (width) and cross-sectional area of a soil disturbance; as well as between depth of operation and cross-sectional area of soil disturbance. In each treatment, the tine width and tine spacing increased the cross-sectional area of soil disturbance significantly. It is hoped that the outcome of this work would generate relevant data for the development of mechanized cassava harvester.