Title: Seed Drill Machinery Management and Optimization for Wheat Production in Dongola, Northern State, Sudan
Authors: Osama Elhabeeb Adam, Abdalla N. O. Kheiry,, Mohamed Hassan Dahab and Adam Bush Adam
Volume: 8
Issue: 8
Pages: 125-133
Publication Date: 2024/08/28
Abstract:
Farm machinery management is of great importance for field crops production. This study aimed to develop a computer program to be used as a decision-making tool for improving the efficiently mechanized field operations such as seed drilling for wheat production under Northern state, Dongola conditions. Some machinery data were collected for computer program development. The developed program contains three units namely; Machinery performance unit to estimate effective field capacity (ha/h), Fuel consumption unit to estimate fuel consumption rate (L/ha) and Field operations costs unit to estimate total cost in (SDG/h and SDG/ ha). Principles of operation research (OR) and linear programming (LP) mathematical modeling techniques were employed to formulate the main objective functions. T-test was used to analyze the collected data. The developed program was verified and validated using actual data from the field. The results showed positive and strong correlations between the predicted and actual effective field capacity and operation costs. For the planting operation, predicted effective field capacity of Baldan drill (4m) was increased by 28% of actual field capacity. Moreover, for same drill the predicted operation cost was lower than the actual costs by 17%. The same trend was observed for the other two seed drills. Sensitivity analysis and accuracy tests were carried out and the developed computer system was found significantly respond to changes of inputs with high accuracy. It was concluded that, after optimization, the best combination option for planting operation it was required 4 implements of size 3.30m, and field capacity 2.22 ha/h, in combination with 36 implements of size 4.00m and 2.69 ha/h to cover an area of 50,000 ha.