Rancang Bangun Alat Pemasang Mulsa Mekanis

Abstract

One of the treatments for horticultural crops is the use of mulch, mulch is a material covering cultivated plants which is intended to maintain soil moisture and suppress the growth of weeds and diseases so that the plants grow well. The manual mulching technique is the most commonly used method, manually installing mulch has several problems, such as a long time and for installing mulch on large plots it requires a large amount of manpower, for this reason a mechanical mulch installation tool is needed which can facilitate the work of farmers. This study aims to design a mechanical mulching device with the parameters studied being the working capacity of the tool, fuel consumption, and the percentage of perfect and imperfect mulch installation. A mechanical mulching device is a tool designed to install mulch by a mechanical method. This tool is run by connecting it to the kart that has been designed. The results showed that the best tool working capacity was obtained in the second repetition with a value of 0.0485 ha/hour and fuel consumption of 0.48 l/hour. The best percentage of installing perfect and imperfect mulch was in the second repetition with values of 66.4% and 33.6%. In terms of economic analysis, the cost of using this tool is IDR 1,548,000/year, has a basic cost of IDR 450,768.797/ha year and will reach a breakeven point on an area of 3.3 Ha/year.