Development of mowing technologies for large levee slopes

摘要

There are many levee slopes surrounding paddy fields in hilly and mountainous region in Japan. Large levee slopes with their slope length over 3 meters increase after land consolidation. These large levee slopes make more difficult and harder to be maintained. Therefore, we planned and manufactured a trial suspended slope mower to reduce the weeding load, and investigated its performance. The mower consists of two units, one is parent unit suspending and drawing child unit via a rope reeled by a winch on it, and the other is child unit mowing weeds in the slope. Its working efficiency was from 3 to 6 ares per an hour, while increase ratio of heart rate on mowing was from 20 to 30 percents.