An adventure in applied science - IRRI books - International Rice ...

IRRI today 181neering Department: Khan, head of the department and agricultural engineer;J. Bart Duff, associate agricultural economist; and Fred E. Nichols, associateevaluation engineer. The department had 11 junior scientists.By 1981, the department had five senior scientists: Clarence W. Bockhop,department head and agricultural engineer; Duff, Malcato Ariyoshi, andMarvin Nafziger, associate agricultural engineers; and John A. Wicks, associateagricultural economist. The number of junior scientists had grown to 27from the 11 in 1972. Furthermore, Khan (as previously mentioned) had beenassigned to Pakistan to assist in machinery introduction, testing, and manufacture— part of IAMN, which was established in 1975 with agriculturalengineers placed not only in Pakistan but in Bangladesh (G.M. Peterson),Burma (J.E. Townsend), Indonesia (Venkat R. Reddy), Thailand (R.C. Fischer),and the Philippines (Robert E. Stickney). The general objective of the IAMNwas to encourage the manufacture of IRRI-designed equipment in othercountries, to test the equipment thoroughly in each country, to introduceappropriate models to farmers, and to train young agricultural engineers atIRRI. A portion of this work received support from USAID.At IRRI, work on machinery design and testing continues at a high level.The annual report for 1979, for example, describes the following activities:• improvement of the design of 6- to 8-hp two-wheeled tillers,• development of a rotary tiller attachment for the 6- to 8-hp tractors,• improvement of the multicrop dryland seeder,• further improvement of a manual 5-row rice transplanter,• improvement of the hand-drawn wetland rice seeder,• design of an improved liquid injector for deep placement of insecticidesor fertilizer,• further improvement of IRRI’s axial-flow rice thresher, and• redesigning of IRRI’s rice hull furnace for grain drying.The ultimate proof of the value of this program is the extent to which theIRRI models are being manufactured and sold to farmers throughout Asia. Forthe past 5 or 6 years, IRRI has had considerable cooperative work going on inthe Iloilo area of the island of Panay, particularly in the cropping systemsprogram and in intensified rice production. There has been a tremendousfarmer demand for IRRI threshers. In 1975, there was essentially no mechanicalthreshing of rice in the area. By 1978, more than half of the farmers were usingIRRI-designed threshers, mostly of theaxial-flow type. By 1979, more than 80%of the farmers growing irrigated rice in Laguna Province were using thethresher. IRRI provides the designs to local manufacturers who then fabricateall elements of the threshers except the engines.In Thailand during 1979, more than 2,100 units of the IRRI axial-flowthresher were manufactured and sold to farmers, a 37% increase over thenumber made the year before.Although the manufacturers sometimes make slight changes in IRRI design,and the machines developed by IRRI have not always proved as good as(for example) Japanese models, the Institute is continually monitoring its