Design, Fabrication and Evaluation of Active Strip Tillage Machine Attachable with Seed Drill

In order to achieve a conservation agriculture, a new strip tillage implement was designed that could be pulled with a drill by tree point hitch attachment in order to make possible tillage and planting practices simultaneously. The developed drilling machine was then used and compared with other tillage methods. An experiment was designed using Randomized Complete Block (RCB) with three replications. Main plots were: The four tillage and planting methods namely: moldboard plow 2 passes of disc leveler drill (T1), 2 passes of disc leveler drill (T2), chisel packer drill (T3) and strip-till-drill (T4 or STD), and the subplots namely: seed density of 160 (S1), 200 (S2) and 240 (S3) kg.ha-1 were the experimental conditions.. Evaluated indices were fuel consumption rate, operation time, field capacity and residue pulverization rate. The results showed that T4 treatment had the lowest fuel consumption and time with 8.6 lit.ha-1 and 1.62 h.ha-1 rates, respectively. T1 and T4 treatments with 0.2 and 0.62 ha.h-1 had the highest and the least rates of field capacity. Residue pulverization was 46.47% in T4 treatment and was not significantly difference with T2. Crop yield in T4 treatment was 11% higher than average of other treatments. Finally it was found that tractors with medium power such as MF285 (with 53 kW engine power) could pull this implement.