PhilRice engineer develops tiller for laboy soils

More than a thousand hectares of laboy soils are not normally used in Aurora province due to their soft and deep mud, but these may soon become productive as PhilRice (Philippine Rice Research Institute) engineers are now fine tuning the design and development of a ride-on floating tiller for their easy land preparation.

In the past, rice yields in laboy soils have been ridiculously low. Farmers were already contented if ever they got one ton for every hectare.

Most of these laboy soils are in Dilasag, Casiguran, Dipaculao, and San Luis towns. Their hard pans are 40 to 100 cm (centimeters) deep, making the soil very difficult and slow to prepare with the conventional two-wheel hand tractor or even the old reliable carabao.

In areas where the hand tractor easily bogs down, farmers have to turn over the weeds manually or trample them with their feet.

PhilRice engineer Dr. Manuel Regalado said farmers in a barangay in San Luis tried but failed to till laboy fields in 2002 by using a commercially available "hydrotiller" to puddle waterlogged soils with knee-deep mud.

The machine would bog down as early as the first pass and required three to four persons to remove it from the mud. The machine was also very cumbersome to use during the second pass because it tended to sink in the mud.

What the farmers need is a tiller that floats on the laboy field even during the third pass with the operator riding on it, otherwise the operator would sink in very deep mud and his safety is endangered by sharp objects. Thus, Regalado and his team are now fine tuning a floating tiller that would cater to the farmers’ need.

A second prototype, smaller and lighter than the first, has been tested already in a very weedy laboy field with 0.3 to 0.8 cm deep mud in Purok Zarcon, Bacong, San Luis. It prepared a 2,300 sqm field in two hours. Thus, its actual field capacity was 0.9 ha a day, much faster and easier than manual preparation.

The machine consumed at most 2.0 liters an hour compared to the first prototype’s consumption of 3.6 liters an hour. Moreover, the operator and farmers observed it was easier to manage and operate.

In another field (2,700 sqm) with 0.7 to 1.0 meter tall weeds, the machine rotavated the field in 99 minutes, indicating a field capacity of 1.3 hectares a day. The operator walked behind the machine during the first pass.

With this machine, the farmers’ harvest could be more than doubled as shown in the seed production site of the San Luis local government unit where the floating tiller was used. The yield went up to 2.8 t/ha with two passes of the floating tiller compared with only 1.0 t/ha in the past.