Performance Evaluation of Super Seeder for Wheat Sowing in Rice-Wheat Cropping System of Pakistan.

In rice-wheat cropping system the emerging Super Seeder (SS) is a tractor operated single pass solution to incorporate the standing and loose paddy residues into soil without burning, prepares land and concurrently sows wheat seed.This study was conducted during 2022 to assess the pros and cons of SS for wheat sowing as well as to compare the economics of wheat production to conventional tillage/broadcasting method (CT). As the SS has not been adopted on large scale to find out its adopters easily; therefore, twenty innovative farmers were included in sampling f rame with non-probability sampling procedure for field survey as well as six field experiments were conducted in Gujranwala zone, Pakistan to evaluate four sowing techniques, i.e., CT, happy seeder, ridge sowing and SS with Randomized Complete Block Design. As compared to CT the SS has been estimated as resource conservation technique regarding sowing time (62.50%), irrigation time (7.69%), seed cost (14%), fertilizer cost (10.81%), and fuel cost (58.33%) with the constrained requirement of higher hp tractor (preferably 85 hp) for sowing operation. An increased wheat yield (13.11%) was estimated with SS (3450 kg ha-1) as compared to CT (3050 kg ha-1) in rice-wheat cropping system. The more net returns (36.15%) were calculated by SS with higher benefit cost ratio value (2.81) as compared to CT with lower value (2.16). Similarly, based on the field experiments data the SS resulted in significantly higher values of emergence count (211 m-2), productive tillers (322 m-2), grains count (38.93 spike-1), 1000 grains weight (38.91 g) and grains yield (3497 kg ha-1) delineating more yield (13.10%) over the CT. Thus, SS has conserved soil moisture, increased soil organic matter, better soil tilth and enhanced fertilizer uptake efficiency which ultimately increased the yield over the other comparative wheat sowing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]