Garlic planting machineries

Mechanization ensures timely farm operation that brings numerous benefits to garlic growers apart from increased crop yield.Among various farm operations performed in onion and garlic cultivation only land development and bed making has been successfully mechanized.Semi-automatic transplanters have been successfully demonstrated but its adoption by farmers has been very limited.There is need to further refine these transplanters for more precision and accuracy and develop automatic transplanters to reduce the labour cost.Intercultural, fertilizer application, plant protection are some of the operations in onion and garlic cultivation, which needs immediate attention for mechanization, Tractor operated garlic planters are being widely used by large farmers.Harvesters and diggers for onion and garlic are still to be adopted by farmers at a large scale.In onion and garlic cultivation, mechanization is mainly limited to the land preparation machines and to some extent planting machines.Other machines to mechanize the operations like transplanting, intercultural, harvesting/digging, which involve a lot of human drudgery when performed manually, need to be developed, demonstrated and popularized amongst the garlic growers.This paper briefs about the current status of development of different types of machines useful for garlic cultivation and expected to be useful for mechanization in garlic cultivation in order to facilitate garlic cultivating farmers.