Development and Performance Evaluation of Engine-Operated Dual Animal Feed Chopping and Milling Machine

Ethiopia’s livestock population is the largest in Africa, however different factors or constraints limit the full exploitation of the agricultural sector in general and the livestock “sub-sector” in particular. In the country, the availability, quality, and quantity of feed have always been a challenge in the livestock sector. This process is laborious and time takes more. To alleviate this problem, using maize and sorghum stalks is an important remedy. Therefore, the chopping and milling machine was developed and evaluated. The research was conducted at Jimma Agricultural Engineering Research Center, Dedo and Kersa districts to evaluate the machine performance in terms of chopping efficiency, throughput capacity, cutting efficiency, milling efficiency and fuel consumption at different speeds of cutter shaft. The output of the chopper was found to be a remarkable achievement. The performance of the machine was evaluated using sorghum stalk, maize stalk, and maize grains with treatments of the engine speed, and feed rate using factorial design with three replications. The highest mean chopping capacity of maize and sorghum stalk (511.33 kg hr-1, 551.33 kg hr-1)respectively, the finest of (shortest) mean cut length maize and sorghum stalk(1.13cm, 1.01cm) respectively, the highest chopping efficiency of maize and sorghum stalk(97.54% , 98.68%) respectively, the highest milling efficiency and milling capacity of maize grains 93.8% and 234kg hr-1respectively,and the mean lowest fuel consumption of maize and sorghum was 0.58 liter and 0.52 liter respectively were recorded. The operation speed was observed to be highly significant among the treatments, at a significance level of 0.05. Based on the result obtained, it is recommended to improve the capacity of the machine.