Agricultural Weeder with Nail Assembly for Weed Control, Soil Moisture Conservation, Soil Aeration and Increasing Crop Productivity

Agricultural weeder with nail assembly, popularly known as CRIJAF Nail Weeder, controls germinating and young weeds. It performs best at field capacity (FC) and has low draft (8–12 kg at FC) requirement. Its operation improves soil hydrothermal regimes and aeration (oxygen diffusion rate, 303 µg^–2 O₂ m^–2 s^–1). It has 5–6 detachable nails, each at 3 cm distance, and has option to attach one scrapper or one tine. Introducing a boat in place of its front wheels and addition of two conical rotors in the mainframe makes it suitable to control weeds in transplanted rice. It requires 12-18 man-days/ha for operation, controls 85–90% weeds, produced 33–40 q/ha jute fibre, 4.5–5 t/ha of upland and transplanted rice, 3.0–4.5 t/ha of wheat and 15 q/ha of mustard. More than 55,000 units have been distributed by the Department of Agriculture, Government of West Bengal.