Field Evaluation of Some Tillage Practices in Rainfed Wheat Planting: Their Effects on Crop Yield Components and Implements

Abstract

This study is aimed to evaluate the effect of multiple tillage practices on the wheat yield in rainfed fields. The experiment was conducted in three field preparation and planting treatments including Conventional tillage (moldboard plow, disc, and centrifugal seed spreader) indicated as T₁, chisel plow, disc, and planting with deep drill as T₂, and conservation tillage (plowing with heavy disc on last year’s crop residues, and planting with deep drill) as T₃. The performance characteristics as well as agronomic and crop yield parameters were measured and analyzed for two consecutive years. The design of experiments was carried out base on Randomized Complete Blocks with four replications. The analysis of results showed that the conservation tillage had a positive effect on soil moisture content, field capacity, energy consumption, seed distribution uniformity, number of grains per spike, number of spikes per unit area, grain yield and production cost when compared to the other treatments. The minimum field efficiency and capacity (0.57 and 0.39 ha/h, respectively) belonged to T₁, while the maximum values were recorded for T₃ treatment (0.72 and 0.58 ha/h, respectively). The fuel consumption for T₃ was 23.3 l/ha due to reduced tillage and planting practices. This value was measured 39.2 l/ha for T₂. Besides, the maximum fuel consumption (46.7 l/ha) was in T₁ treatment owing to use the moldboard plow.