抄録
Optimum farm machinery selection may reduce production costs considerably.In doing this, one has to take into account the size of the farm, the distribution of cropsand crop rotation, cultural practices used throughout the year, farm machinery technical dataand consumption costs for each operation. Moreover one has to take into account soil, cropand weather characteristics in order to reach a reliable prediction of the suitable days forfield work throughout the year, which inevitably impose a time restriction in farm machineryoperations. In the present work, linear programming was employed as a mathematicaltool for providing the right selection of farm machinery, based on minimizing machineryoperational costs, taking into consideration all above mentioned interrelated factors and constraints.
For 400 ha of agricultural land, allocated for the cultivation of 4 different crops (wheat200 ha, corn 100 ha, alfalfa 50 ha and beans 50 ha), considering four different tractor sizes (44, 56, 76, and 148 kW), it was found that optimum agricultural machinery selection wouldinclude four 76 kW tractors and two 44 kW tractors.
