Design and experiment of hill sowing wheel of precision rice direct-seeder

A new hill sowing wheel of precision rice direct-seeder was designed. Four different varieties of rice seeds were selected to test the five different shaped orifices of the seed-metering wheel. Test results showed the gourd-like shaped orifice was better than the others and there were 2～6 seeds in the hill with probability of more than 90%, leakage-seeding rate less than 5% when gourd-like shaped orifice wheel was tested. The average hill spacing and the average hill diameter could meet the requirement of precision rice direct-seeding. The comparative experiments indicated that gourd-like shaped orifice had little effect on rice germination rate and the suitable number of the gourd-like shaped orifice was 6. The research results provided the theoretical basis for seed-metering wheel of precision rice direct-seeder with hill sowing.