STUDY THE EFFECTS OF SPEEDS AND DEPTHS OF PLOWING ON SOME TECHNICAL INDICATORS USING ROTARY PLOW TYPE MINI 1200

Abstract

An experiment was carried out at the field of College of Agriculture, University of Diyala during the autumn season 2015 - 2016 to study the effect of speed and depth of plowing on performance of rotary plow by using the machine unit consists of orchard tractor type B 2530 and mini rotary plow type 1200 in clay loam soil. The experiment was done by using random complete block design (RCBD) as a full factorial experiment with two factors. The first factor represents the plowing depths with two levels 2-4 cm and 8-10 cm, while the second factor represents the forward speed of the tractor with three levels 1.66, 3.05 and 4.35 km h-1 with three replicates. The results showed that the depth 2-4 cm shows a higher significant effect than depth 8-10 cm of all study parameters except the volume of soil affected with less slippage percentage. The results also showed that the speed 4.35 km h-1 has a high effect comparing with speeds 3.05 and 1.66 km h-1 in all study parameters with less slippage percentage too. Meanwhile the interaction between the first speed 1.66 km h-1 with the first depth 2-4 cm showed a higher significant effect than other interactions for speed coefficient and actual field capacity with less slippage percentage. The highest productivity was on third speed 4.35 km h-1 with 2-4 cm depth 0.401 hectare h-1 and the third speed with depth 8-10 cm showed the largest volume of the soil distribution under 0.05 probability level.From the result, we concluded that increasing the speed of the tractor has led to increase the field productivity, the volume of soil distribution, field efficiency and the coefficient of speed exploit at the lowest slippage percentage. While increase in the depth of tillage led to increase of the slippage percentage and the volume of soil distribution with decreasing in coefficient of speed exploit, field efficiency and effective field productivity. Thus the recommendation of plowing process by using the rotary plow should be at the shallow depths with high speeds to obtain the highest values of the characteristics studied.