DEVELOPMENT OF SEED PELLETING TECHNOLOGY

Many vegetable and grass seeds are small, light and irregular in shape; therefore, it is difficult to plant them precisely. There is very little control over the seed rate, seed spacing, seed depth, line sowing, etc.Seed pelleting is the process of enclosing the seed into some kind of inert material just large enough to produce a globular size. The most essential phases of precision planting are the singling of seeds for exact placement at a predetermined depth and spacing in the soil with a uniform coverage. The freshly harvested seeds of lucerne, soybean and chilli were pelleted.The gum Arabic, 20% solution in water was used as the binding material. A process of seed pelletization was standardized. Different coating materials and their proportions were tried.The selected seeds were palletized with the help of seed pelletizer. The pelletization efficiency 84-92, 100, and 95-98 % and the estimated cost of seed pelletization comes to be about Rs 34, 11.50 and 34 per kg of seed for lucerne soybean and chilli, respectively. The pellet bulk density and 1000 pellets mass increased with the increase in time of pelletization for all the seeds.