Methods for pre-sowing treatment of legume grass seeds to improve their sowing properties

Abstract

In recent years, more and more areas of agricultural land have been cultivated with the valuable non-traditional fodder crop galega, which perfectly combines high productivity with excellent fodder values and sustainable seed production, rationally uses agro-climatic conditions of the zone and increases soil fertility, and is valuable as a forecrop and a honey-bearing plant. The sowing material of the Eastern galega contains 50…95% of seeds with a hard shell. Seed hardness is explained by impermeability of seed shells to water and air. To increase the germinating capacity of seeds and reduce the norm of galega seeds sowing to 2.0 million/ha the sowing material of perennial leguminous fodder crop - Eastern galega should undergo pre-sowing treatment - scarification and seed inoculation. The construction and working principle of the developed technical means are presented: a scarifier SS-0,5 and an inoculator IS-1,0. The developed scarifier and inoculator of seeds of leguminous crops qualitatively perform the technological process of pre-sowing treatment of Eastern galega seeds. At optimum feed of 0.5 t/h and 1.0 t/h, the quality indicator of Eastern galega seed scarifying reaches 98.8 %, the completeness of inoculator treatment reaches 99.8 %, without seed damage that meets the agrotechnical requirements.