Accuplast Technologies Abbigere, Bangalore, Karnataka

One of the major head aches in running a polybag rubber nursery is organising the filling of polybags with the top soil and also carrying this heavy stuff around. Major issues here is the non-availability of the top soil (as it depletes year on year ) and the highly labour intensive soil filling operation. In the case of root trainer, the potting medium can be filled much faster as the quantity to be filled is way too small as compared to ploybag. But in big nurseries even that can be a very time consuming operation given the large quantity of planting materials generated. In such instances our Medium Filling Machine can come handy which can fill about 1000 root trainers in an hour. This a very robust machine which can be operated with minimal man power. Potmed Fillchine operates on single phase electrical energy – no hydraulics nor pneumatics are involved giving rise to very clean and non-messy operations. When it comes to think about the mechanisation of rubber nursery operations, the ready to fill potting medium and the filling machine together take the nursery technology decades ahead.

By adopting root trainer planting , apart from generation of high quality planting material, one of the major advantages one gets is the modularity it creates in the nursery operations. Some 15 plants can be comfortably processed from start to finish as a single MODULE for ease of management, handling, transportation, space utilisation etc. This is done with the help of appropriately designed holding stands that carry these 15 nos as a single unit throughout the process starting from seed planting through budding, cut back, bud growth, suspension during Air Hardening phase , storage, transportation and field transfer. These stands were originally designed to facilitate suspension of the plants during the Air Hardening phase. To explain this phase in a bit of detail- in this phase of the generation cycle which suceeds the budding and cut-back phase , the tap root in the middle of the root foliage grows vigorously towards the drainage hole at the bottom , but gets restricted at the bottom end as its contact with soil is suddenly arrested . This restrictive force fills in the potency in the tap root resulting in an explosive surge in its growth no sooner than it is exposed to the soil upon transplanting. To facilitate this air hardening, the plant needs to be suspended in the air. So the stands were originally designed for this purpose. But with appropriate design features incorporated the same stands can now be utilised throughout all the phases of planting material generation as described above, thereby bringing great modularity and orderliness to the entire nursery operations.

Its our passion to be at the cutting edge of the technology. That’s what has prompted us to jump into the foray of root trainers for rubber plant generation way back in 2008. With technical guidance from Rubber Research Institute of India (RRII), we prototyped the first ROOT TRAINER for rubber planting material in 2008. After a number of trials, the current design was frozen and the first Root Trainer for rubber was moulded out at Accuplast. Accuroot Root Trainer- the accurately and precisely designed Root Trainers for rubber planting material was thus born. The planting material generation technology for rubber has gone through a process of evolution over the last one century. We call it evolution from First Generation Technology through Fourth Generation Technology.