Experimental study on areodynamic property and broadcasting sowing of sprouted rice seeds

Rice is one of the most important food crops in the world as well as in China. The growing patterns of rice are manually or mechanically seedling transplanting, potted seedling broadcasting, potted seedling transplanting, dry land or paddy field direct sowing, etc. Sprouted rice seed broadcasting is a new simple cultural technology based on direct sowing and potted seedling broadcasting. It can save seeds, time and labor, cost less and of higher production efficiency than manually transplanting of rice seedling. The disadvantages of sprouted rice seeds manually broadcasting are also analyzed in this paper. The aerodynamic property of sprouted rice seed was tested to provide parameters for developing sprouted seeds broadcasting machine and increase the distribution uniformity of pneumatically broadcasted sprouted seeds. The results showed that the floating speed and coefficient are related with the length of sprout and kernel weight of the sprouted seeds, the regression equation of the floating coefficient varying with the ratio of sprout length (SL) to kernel weight (KW) was derived and it can be used to determine the floating coefficient and floating speed of sprouted seeds within certain limit. The distribution uniformity test of pneumatic broadcasting with a machine for seedling broadcasting was conducted and the results showed that the uniformity can meet the requirement of agronomy specification and it had no mechanical damage to the sprout.