DEVELOPMENT OF A SUITABLE PLANTER FOR HYBRID RICE CROP

Laboratory experiment was carried out at rice mechanization center (agric. eng. res. institute, ministry of agric.) in kafr el-sheikh to determined some of physical and engineering properties for egyptian hybrid rice no.1 that help in develope of a suitable precision vacuum planter for sowing dry, soaking and incubated hybrid rice seeds.the rice seed (dry, soaked and incubated) properties were seed moisture content (mc), mean dimensions {length (l), width (w) and thickness (th)}, shape index (si), seed density (p), weight of 1000 seeds (wi), sphericity (sp), arithmetic mean diameter (da), geometric mean diameter (dg), repose angle (ra), dynamic coefficient of friction (fd) and terminal velocity (tv).from laboratory experiments, it has been manufacturing a precision vacuum planter unit suitable for planting hybrid rice seeds in two rows with 150 mm and 150 mm spaced in the row.