Determining the pattern of locating potato tubers across the field

The author claims that the existing method of agromechanical quality assessment of planting potato tubers and achieving uniform crop distribution across the field surface uses a special factor that takes into account the ratio of the number of intervals equal to an average step of planting to the total number of measured intervals between tubers. However, this coefficient, not being a statistical indicator, does not take into account the random nature of inter-tuber intervals and can lead to errors in the planning of future yields. The paper presents a technique developed for reliable parametric evaluation and selection of a more rational pattern
for locating plants across a field that meets the requirements of a relatively higher yield. For this purpose, each interval with different ways of tuber layout was determined as a random variable, subject to a certain distribution law. The obtained results confirmed the substantiality of the coefficient of crop planting at a 10% significance level of Fisher’s criterion (F) and the presence of significance in the differentiation of the average yield at a 5% significance level of Student’s test (t). It has been established that the probabilistic
relationship between the relative yield and the coefficient of variation of the planting step is quite high with a correlation coefficient of 0.81 and 0.71 at a step of 0.30 and 0.35 m, respectively. Equations have been obtained that allow evaluating the uniform distribution of potato tubers over the field area with different planting patterns and in-row crop arrangement for an average planting step of 30 and 35 cm. Research results have shown that the random nature of the tubers layout has a significant effect on the yield, which
decreases when the coefficient of variation exceeds 25%, and as the average planting step decreases, this effect reduces as well.