On Farm Performance Evaluation of Back Pack Weeder for Weed Control in Cassava: A Case of Busia County, Kenya

This research work involved performance evaluation of back pack weeder in four representative cassava planted farms in Busia County. The main objective of the research study was to test the performance of the mechanical back pack weeder in cassava crop and comparing it with manual weeding. This was done in four test plots which were sampled in different sub counties based on the condition of small scale farmer accessibility and also a representative of each sub-county. In all the plots cassava was planted using the right agronomic requirements. The choice of the crop was depended on farmers and stakeholders preference to the most profitable and mechanizable crop in the county. This was done using the ranking method in order to achieve the crop with the highest interest in terms of profitability and mechanization need. Machinery evaluation is always very significant as it gives the performance rate of agricultural machinery and quality of operation based on the farm in which they are used. It is for this reason that the back pack weeder was preferred and evaluated against manual weeding for the farmer to understand the use and maintenance as well as its benefits compared to manual weeding using a jembe. The use of a back pack weeder for weeding in cassava as opposed to manual weeding using a jembe proved that it can improve weeding quality and also reduces elapsed time and the costs involved in the weeding operation. The evaluated parameters were weeding efficiency, fuel consumption, operation time, plant damage, effective field capacity and field efficiency. The results show that efficiencies for test plots 1, 2 and 4 were high ranging from 97.1%, 98%, 97% with bit lower fuel consumption of 0.4l/hr and operational cost of 1360kes/ha, 1366kes/ha and 1361kes/ha respectively due to the nature of soils texture which was equally sandy loam. The plant damage for all plots were found to be the same for both machine and manual weeding. The operational cost of manual was equally the same since the same number of casuals were used but the machine was a bit higher for the case of test plot 3 since it consumed a high amount of fuel. The weeding efficiency was depicted as 97.1 %, 98%, 86% and 97% for machine weeding for the four test plots respectively and 78%, 78%, 72% and 77% for hand weeding, since the human labour removes the weeds hence the efficiency of weeding was highest.