Study on inundation periods of land for mechanical transplanting under minimum tillage unpuddled transplanting

In Bangladesh and other countries in Asia, manual transplanting of rice into puddled soil is conventional practice but relies on access to cheap readily-available labour. Besides being costly and time consuming, puddling results in degradation of soil (Chauhan et al., 2012). The use of continuous puddling results in the formation of a hard pan with a consequent increase in bulk density and lowering of hydraulic conductivity below the plow layer (Singh et al., 2009). To overcome labour and water shortages, mechanical transplanting of rice under minimum tillage is of considerable interest but little is known of the optimal inundation for soils before transplanting. In this study both farmers’ participatory and research station-based experiments evaluated the performance of a mechanical rice transplanter at Bangladesh Rice Research Institute research farm, Gazipur and on farmers’ fields at Kushtia and Rangpur, Bangladesh under minimum tillage options and varied inundation periods