Power Requirements of Shallow and Deep Tillage as Affected by Number of Wheel Traffic

Abstract

Soil compaction is one of the issues that many agricultural lands suffer from, and one of the main reasons for that, is wheel traffic which pass through the field. Therefore, this study was conducted with the aim of studying the effect of the agricultural machinery traffic and the type of tillage on some of the studied characteristics (drawbar power (DP), wasted power by slippage (WPS), clods greater than 100 mm (CGT)) at soil moisture content of 17-20%. The experiment was conducted during the autumn agricultural season (2022) in Nineveh governorate in Iraq, in silty clay soil. The experiment was designed according to split plot design with four replications. the main plots were allocated to tillage type (shallow tillage, and deep tillage), while the secondary plots were allocated for traffic systems (zero traffic, it represents the controlled traffic framing system (CTF), one time of traffic, two times of traffic, and three times of traffic, they represent the random traffic framing system (RTF)). The results showed that the CTF compared RTF, was significantly reduced all the studied characteristics (DP, WPS and CGT) by percentages (68%, 70%, and 75%) at shallow tillage respectively, and (49%, 67%, and 84%) at deep tillage, respectively.