Thanh Tri Agricultural Machinery Co., Ltd. (495 National Highway 20, Lien Nghia Town, Duc Trong District, Lam Dong Province) has just launched the first "made in Vietnam" tray seedling sowing machine.
Mr. Le Thanh Tri, the company's director, said the machine was created based on an order from two businesses in the North. "This was an urgent requirement due to the government's policy of consolidating land into large fields, demanding modern machinery to free up manual labor," Mr. Tri explained.
With the extensive experience of a long-time mechanical engineer, Mr. Tri successfully produced the tray seedling sowing machine in just 2.5 months of direct design and manufacturing. He was able to showcase it at the Agroviet 2012 International Agricultural Fair held in Ho Chi Minh City last November and immediately won a gold medal.
The machine's operating mechanism consists of six stages. First, the tray separation unit separates each tray individually from a stack of 20 trays at a time. Next, automatic units fill the trays with soil to an adjustable thickness, level the soil evenly, and wet each tray with water to create a wet, muddy consistency. Rice seeds are then sown on the trays at an adjustable density (100-200g/tray). The last two units apply a thin layer of soil to each tray before being moved to an automatic lifting and stacking unit, which stacks them into piles for transport to the nursery.
A unique feature of Mr. Tri's sowing machine is that the tray lifting mechanism does not damage the trays like other imported machines because the machine's parts do not rub against or come into contact with the trays, resulting in greater tray durability.
The machine has a lifespan of 5-10 years and comes with a 12-month warranty. The machine has a seedling sowing productivity of 650-850 trays/hour (compared to only 30-40 trays/hour when sowing rice by hand). The seed uniformity rate reaches 97%, saving a significant amount of rice seeds. The machine costs only 120 million VND, three times cheaper than similar imported machines.
