VietNamNet Bridge - The unmanned ditching machine invented by Vo Van Phuoc, a farmer in HCM City, has been favored by farmers because it saves labor and expenses on field work.

“When starting a new crop, farmers have to ditch and groove their fields. It takes farmers several days or a whole week. I decided to create a ditching machine to save the labor and time,” Phuoc said.

Phuoc found the components and accessories for his machine at scrap shops and then welded, lathed and assembled the components at the small workshop of his friend.

When Phuoc put the machine into trial at a field for the first time, the machine could run for 15 minutes only and stopped: straw stuck on the drill.

After a lot of sleepless nights, Phuoc found a solution to the problem. He decided to install a water supply unit on the machine.

“The unit can take water directly from fields and spray into the drill. Thanks to this, the soil clung on to the drill will drift away, so it cannot cause congestion,” he explained.

Phuoc’s ditching machine has a simple structure. The body of the machine is just like a tractor, the tail assembly is attached to a soil excavation unit which has a drill bit in the middle, two mud ejecting tubes on the two sides and an auxiliary water pumping tank.

When the machine operates, the drill works as an excavator which digs the earth and rolls the soil inwards. The water and mud will shoot out. In case the water level in the field is not enough for the engine to operate, the auxiliary water tank will provide water to maintain the operation.

The special characteristic of Phuoc’s ditching machine is that it is an unmanned machine. There is a wheel in the middle which acts as the navigation unit and determines the way the machine will go. 

Mai Tan Tien, director of Tan Tien Cooperative in Dong Thap province, said: “It always took much time and effort to dig a ditch in the past. But the machine has helped ease the work. It takes only several days to work on hundreds of cong of land (one ‘cong’ is equal to 1,000 square meters).”

Phuoc’s machine can dig more than 1,000 square meters of land per hour, equal to work done manually by 30-40 workers, which halves the ditching cost.

CA TPHCM