Abstract:
Pineapple (Ananas comosus) is a heavy feeder and
needs more nutrients to get an optimum yield.
Fertilizer application is problematic in all
Pineapple cultivations mainly due to two reasons.
On the one hand, there are spiny and pointed
leaves and on the other hand, the place where
fertilization needs to be applied. The fertilizer
should be applied to the base of the leaves and is
a laborious and annoying practice, especially
when done manually in commercial cultivation.
Therefore, there is a necessity to develop a
convenient technique to facilitate the fertilizer
application. Hence, an experiment was conducted
at the University of Colombo Institute for AgroTechnology and Rural Sciences, Hambantota, Sri
Lanka to develop a simple tool to apply chemical
fertilizer at the base of Pineapple leaves. The tool
was developed using PVC pipes, nuts, bolts,
rubber bands, a spring and glue. All these items
were assembled in an orderly manner to develop a
smart and a simple tool to achieve the purpose.
The height of the tool can be adjusted by changing
the fertilizer loading component. A questionnaire
survey was conducted among the pineapple
cultivators to evaluate the usefulness of the tool.
The weight, height, safety, efficiency, cost and
overall acceptability were evaluated using a fivepoint Likert scale. Further, the developed tool was
compared with manual fertilizer application to
monitor the time taken to apply fertilizers and the
labour cost using 20 pineapple plants at the same
age. The independent sample T-test was used to
test the significance at 5% level. The tool placed
the recommended amount of fertilizer/plant in two
pushes (5.1 ± 0.19g) and covered 20 plants with
an efficiency of 326.84 ± 2.46%. And efficiency of
the cost involvement of the tool was 305.84 ±
3.58%. The farmer responses indicated that the
tool was a simple, portable, smart and userfriendly tool with more advantages.
