Development of a Reciprocating Weeding Machine for Commodity Crop Production

Abstract

A lot of efforts have been made to develop different types of weeding machines in Nigeria with different drive mechanisms, features, designs, and steering mechanisms. Up to this point, no model or design have been commercialized but they remain in the prototype stage. So weeding is still a manual operation in Nigeria and most African countries. Although chemical weeding is being adopted in many places, its side effects has been a major concern. Therefore, a motorized single row, reciprocating weeder was designed, fabricated and tested. The result indicated a quality performance efficiency of 82.7% and field capacity of 0.03m²/s as against 0.01m²/s with manual weeding. The material for the construction was sourced from readily available materials.