Backpack Granular Fertilizer Dispenser / Aplicator

BACKPACK GRANULAR FERTILIZER DISPENSER / APLICATOR

1. Idea Description Summary :

Scenario of Project Idea

During my experience working in biotechnology industry handling millions of banana plantlets grown in nursery annually, I experienced difficulty in determining the actual dosage of fertilizer applied to the 5" x 6" polybag. Since the application is manually done by hand, it causes over / under dosage and wrong placement of fertilizer in the polybag. This resulted in scorching of plantlets due to over dosage, plantlets not growing well due to under dosage and mortality of plantlets if the fertilizer granules are placed too close to the stem or the granules spread in the process of application. The losses due to these factors are estimated around 2 - 5%.

Fertilizer application exercise is a tedious and back breaking activity especially so if one need to fertilize around 80,000 – 100,000 polybags per month. The person needs to bend to reach the 6" polybag height in order to place the granulated fertilizer onto the polybag.

Based on the experience hence the idea

To design, develop and manufacture the best tool that can be used to apply granular fertilizer to planting polybag in nursery quickly and accurately, avoiding unnecessary losses of inputs and products.

• Precise and accurate dosage of fertilizer application is vital for the seedlings to achieve and register optimum growth and reach marketable size at the stipulated age or nursery period.

• Precise and accurate placement of fertilizer in the planting polybag is also critical to avoid unnecessary losses and mortality of plantlets as a result of fertilizer being placed too close to the stem.

• The Dispenser will ensure fertilizer granules are placed in the planting polybag without any "cebret-cebret" elsewhere thus avoiding losses of inputs.

• The Dispenser will make fertilizer application work easier, less back breaking and faster. This will result in improve work efficiency where one man/day will be able to fertilize more plantlets in growing polybags as compared to current methods.

a. Problem Statement

Presently, Malaysian Government encourages biotechnology as new revenue front. With that there are many new developments of biotechnology companies focusing in the production of various herbal plants as well as tropical fruit crop. Each of these companies will need to have plant nursery. The problem of inaccurate dosage and fertilizer placement in the planting polybag will persist, registering higher losses especially when the industry has grown.

b. What is the Idea

The idea is to design, paten the IP and develop prototype of