DESIGN ,FABRICATION AND PERFORMANCE TEST OF DATE PALM POLLINATOR

Abstract

Mechanical Pollination of date palms was mostly developed where labor is expensive and not always available . It is estimated that Labor must Climb a date palm several times from the time of pollination through to crop harvesting. Which may cause breakage or death some time. The present Pollinator was designed to pollinate date palm trees have rage between (3-10) m. The designed Pollinator was fabricated from local materials, at Agricultural Engineering Department workshop of Agricultural Studies College - Sudan University of Science and Technology. It was checked at the workshop, and tested at the orchard of Agricultural Studies Collage, by compared with manual pollination. The results indicated that: - - Dates yield of manual pollination was 95%, while that of mechanical Pollination was 99.2% compared to the average time ratio for one date palm tree pollination manually and mechanically was (13:1) minuets. - The average quantity of pollen grains used for one date palm tree pollinate manually was 50 grams, while that used for mechanical pollination was 14 grams. - The total conclusion cost of one equipment was found to be about 300 Sudanese pounds (SDG)