Optimizing of dry land seeder (for Khuzestan dry land condition)

As the price of imported no-till-drill machines is very high, manufacturing and evaluation of a new machine with appropriate price has been consider in this study. The machine could drill seed and fertilizer in different depths in dry land sandy soil with residue cover. Main parts of manufactured machine, such as chassis, seed and fertilizer tanks, the metering system and press wheels were the same as that of conventional dry land seeder. Coulter and soil opener, which are important parts of no-till-drill machine, were designed such a way to open a row in untilled soil by one pass of machine through the field. Then seed and fertilizer granules have been planted directly. The optimized dry land seeder was tested for its performance evaluation in the field condition in the basis of the parameters of working depth evenness, intra-row seed spacing uniformity, seed germination percentage, fuel consumption, tractor slippage, total time requirement, and machine field capacity. Experiments were conducted at three levels of soil moisture contents (M1= 8-10%, M2= 16-18% and M3= 23-25%) and at three levels of forward speeds (V1= 4 km/h, V2= 6 km/h and V3= 8 km/h). The above treatments were also compared with conventional method: soil tilling by mould board plow + chisel plow + dry land seeder. The results showed that the highest intra-row seed spacing uniformity (79.3%) and seed germination percentage (83.4%) were belonged to conventional method. The lowest fuel consumption with 9.4 liter/ha was for treatment M3V1. Conventional method with 0.19 ha/h and treatments M1V3, M2V3 and M3V3 with averagely 1.05 had the lowest and highest machine field capacity respectively. For better results, optimized machine must be used in soil moisture content of 16-18% (M2). Appropriate forward speed also 6-8 km/h is recommended. Although, obtained results demonstrate possibility of using optimized machine instead of conventional method.