DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A LOW COST PETITE TRAILER FOR FARM TRANSPORT

Transporting goods is a basic need for all farming operations. Transportfacilities greatly influence the timing of fieldwork (seeding, fertilization) anddetermined the economic success of a farming enterprise by opening accessto local markets. At present it can be estimated, about 20% of farm transportis done by mechanical trailer, 20% by traction animals and the remaining60% by manual power. It is only available for few farmlands, which are closeto good service roads. Lack of adequate transport causes late harvesting ofcrop is left in the fields because of lack of transports. It has been observedthat poor transport is accountable for a total loss of about 25% of theharvests.The objective of this study was to design and development of a low costappropriate mounted type petite trailer for four-wheel tractor to solve the onfarmand farm-market transport problems.The designed mounted type cart used for the experiments, consists of awooden platform, a metal frame and tree point linkage for the attachment ofthe four-wheel tractor.Fuel consumption (Uhr), traveling speed (kmlhr) , production cost per cubicmeter space (Rs/m\ total weight (kg) and farmer opinion were considered ascriteria for comparison of merits and demerits.From the result, it was observed that the performance of developed trailerwas significantly higher. The fuel consumption is twelve times lower and thetotal weight was ten times lower than the average conventional trailer. It wascalculated that the traditional trailer is fifteen times can be recommended asbetter transporting equipment which is successfully used in on farm transport