DETERMINING QUALITY CRITERIA OF PRE-SOWING SOIL TILLAGE USING DIFFERENT TILLAGE MACHINES

Improving the quality of pre-sowing tillage, especially for small-seeded crops is an urgent task, which directly affects the yield and cost of farm produce. At the same time, the quality of pre-sowing soil treatment can be assessed according to different properties and characteristics, taking into account the type of soil. Basing on the method of statistical processing of experimental data, a quality criterion for pre-sowing tillage has been proposed, which is determined by the dependence on the weighted average size of soil aggregates, and ranges between 0.40 and 0.90, depending on the test conditions. Laboratory-field studies of pre-sowing tillage of soil by various tillage machines РВК-3,6; БМКА-3,0В; КБМ-8,0НУ. The authors have obtained data on physical properties and the criterion of the soil deformation to the agronomically acceptable size of soil peds using standard techniques. The analysis of laboratory and field test results has shown that in the soil conditions of the Tver region, the РВК-3,6 unit crushes soil more intensively, as compared with other tillage machines. However, it has been found that in terms of the qualitative change in the technological properties of the soil (density, moisture content, and levelling), the РВК-3,6 unit is inferior to a prototype of the block-modular combined БМКА-3,0В unit. The authors note that the use of a weighted average medium-volume, a generalized medium-size, dispersion and the coefficient of variation of soil peds for the evaluation of the tested soil-cultivating units provides for fuller evaluation of the uniformity of soil profile deformation.