Performance and Effects on Soybean Cultivation of Disk Cultivator-Ridger (Part 1)

——Comparison of Work Efficiency, Power Requirements and Fuel Consumption with Rotary Cultivators——

Abstract

The problems of rotary cultivators that are widely used in Japan for inter-row cultivating and earthing up are soil kneading under wet soil conditions and low travel speed. To improve these problems, we have developed disk cultivator-ridgers. With these machines, inter-row soil is turned over laterally by the revolution of the disks and consequently inter-row cultivating and earthing up are performed. The work rate, power requirements and fuel consumption of disk cultivator-ridgers were investigated in comparison with those of rotary cultivators. The following results were obtained. (1) At a fixed travel speed of 1.2 m/s for the disk cultivator-ridgers and 0.65 m/s for the rotary cultivators, the effective field capacity of the disk cultivator-ridgers was 72-95 a/h, 1.7-1.9 times that of the rotary cultivators. (2) A comparison of commonly used travel speeds, 1.0-1.6 m/s for the disk cultivator-ridger and 0.5-0.8 m/s for the rotary cultivator, revealed that although the power requirements of the disk cultivator-ridgers were almost the same as those of the rotary cultivators, the energy requirements and the fuel consumption of the disk cultivator-ridgers were almost half those of the rotary cultivators.