Lakhanlal (41) joined farming along with his father and brother immediately after completing his class 10th examination. He now owns 10 acre of land wherein he cultivates sunflower, coriander and groundnut crops.

The farmers in his village faced difficulty in extracting the seeds of sunflower due to the shortage of manpower. Theygrew sunflower at a large scale but were unable to get good return while selling sunflower without extracting seeds. Lakhanlal enquired about machines available for the purpose but found them to be costly and out of reach of farmers like him. Therefore he started developing lowcost machinefor separating seeds from sunflowers at a minimal cost. He successfully developed and tested a prototype in his field.

Thesunflower seed extractor is powered by a 1 hp motor and has a series of rubber belts as beating unit, which strikesthe sunflower, resulting in its deseeding.Its capacity is 40 kg/h with deseeding efficiency> 95% and percentage damage < 1%. It costsRs. 21,000/- .