Modeling of soil tillage techniques based on four cropping seasons

Abstract

Nowadays, it is compulsory to reduce the production costs of the crop and to adopt methods favoring sustainable agriculture. This is achieved through the reduction of tillage operations by adopting conservation tillage allowing the saving of energy and production costs. Indeed, reduced tillage would offer farmers the opportunity to comply with good management practices. In this paper, a conservation plowing based on the permanent bed technique was carried out, in northern Tunisia, in order to assess the effectiveness of this new tillage method. In this context, the study was spread over a period of 4 years by comparing this conservative method with conventional tillage. The results show that the traction effort, the resistance of penetration, and the bulk density for the conventional tillage technique are greater than those of the permanent bed technique during the 4 campaigns. On the other hand, the Fruchterman–Reingold algorithm illustrated the relationship between the two tillage techniques and their most influencing and related factors mainly the traction effort, the depth, the number of passes, the time, the bulk density, and the resistance of penetration. This algorithm showed that the relationships between all the studied factors are the same. However the strength of the relation changes from a technique to another.