Designing and Performance Test of Date Palm Pollination Equipment

Abstract

Date Palm is one of major fruit crops of the Arab countries. Presently, the date growers are facing the problem of lack of skills workers during the period of pollination, which consists of climbing the date palm trees and putting the male strand in female flower (Manual pollination) and also some farmers lift their higher 8 date trees without pollination. . To resolve these problems, the mechanical .pollination may be an interesting alternative to manual pollination This equipment pollinator was designed to pollinate higher trees of date palm as one of solution for the above problem. The pollinator was designed in DALL Workshop Company and Agricultural Engineering Workshop in College of Agricultural in Sudan University of Science and Technology. The suitable factors to evaluate the equipment include equipment height, area spray, time pollination, distance spray, and total cost. The results of the performance test for previous factors when compared with manual pollination show that the pollinator has high efficiency, hence it can pollinated about 276 date palm trees in one hour while manual pollination only 4.6 date palm trees. The pollinator has changeable height that permits to do operation to different height trees till maximum height of 7.5 m, .(and finally the total cost for one unit 500 Sudanese Pound(100$