Performance Evaluation of Non-Puddled Rice Transplanting Methods1

Rice transplanting is the most common method of rice establishment in the lowland areas. As a traditional practice, in Nepal and elsewhere, transplanting is done on well tilled and puddled soil. Puddling not only consumes much energy and time from the tillage point of view but also consumes a large quantity of the total water requirement in rice. This paper reports on a recent experiment that is evaluating a new conservation agriculture rice crop establishment method, zero-till transplanted rice that is attempting side step the submergence problem while keeping all the other CA traits in place. The main objectives of the experiment were to evaluate non-puddled rice transplanting technique with different tillage options and to observe effect of mulching on weed control and rice grain yield. The experiment consisted of three treatments viz. manual rice transplanting on tilled plot, manual rice transplanting in power tiller strip tilled plot and transplanting of rice with manual rice transplanter in zero-tilled plot. The experiment was conducted in 2005 and 2006 rice season at National Wheat Research Program, Bhairahawa. Grain yield different among the treatments was highly significant in both the years. First year, strip-tillage produced the highest mean grain yield of 5940 kg/ha followed by no-till TPR(5564 kg/ha) and tractor land preparation (5207 kg/ha). All the treatments showed significantly higher grain yield than their respective mulched treatment. Second year, no-till TPR produced the highest mean grain yield of 6321 kg/ha followed by strip-tilled TPR (5910 kg/ha) and tractor land preparation TPR (5832 kg/ha). Like first year, grain yields in all the treatments were higher than their respective mulched treatments. The yield differences in no-till TPR and strip-tilled TPR were significant but it was not significant in tractor land preparation treatment