Abstract
Soil strength/penetration resistance of lowland puddled soil is an important parameter for designing farm machinery. This study was aimed to estimate the overall penetration resistance of lowland puddled soils through the assessment of bulk soil parameters. Penetration resistance and bulk soil parameters including moisture content, bulk density, particle density, porosity, texture and organic matter content were measured under real field condition and evaluated to identify the suitable determinants to explain the variation of soil penetration resistance and their relationships. Results revealed that measured penetration resistance by Eijkelkamp hand penetrometer and bulk soil parameters except particle density, notably varied with weed controlling methods, depth of the soil and the time. Penetration resistance showed a significant relationship with bulk density (BD), moisture content (MC) and porosity (PO) at .05 α level as using the relationships 4017.87- 44.72 MC -1669.83 BD, 2115.65-44.18 PO and 3383.78-58.09 PO in 0 – 10 cm, 10 – 20 cm and 20 – 30 cm depths, respectively. Tropical Agricultural Research Vol. 26 (3): 561 – 568 (2015)
Highlights
The soil-crop-machinery interaction studies give paramount importance in providing design parameters such as soil strength which is useful to determine the workability of farm machinery (IRRI, 1994), draft (Lipiec and Hatano, 2003) and power requirements (Hillel, 2004) etc
penetration resistance (PR) significantly increased with the depth of the soil from 496.59 kPa to 1635.40 kPa
While considering the temporal variation, PR increased with time from lowest at puddling (151.28 kPa) to highest at 6 WAT (1364.45 kPa) it decreased little upto 8 WAT and remained constant till 14 WAT
Summary
The soil-crop-machinery interaction studies give paramount importance in providing design parameters such as soil strength which is useful to determine the workability of farm machinery (IRRI, 1994), draft (Lipiec and Hatano, 2003) and power requirements (Hillel, 2004) etc. PR is not soil strength but a composite parameter which could be related to the soil strength (Hillel, 2004) Though this relationship has not been defined yet, PR values are used for engineering applications due to its easiness and simplicity in measurement (Hillel, 2004). it is not adequate for accurate assessment of soil strength (Lipiec and Hatano, 2003) because assessing by one direct index may mislead the results (Campbell and Henshall, 1991).On the other hand, PR. This study was aimed to estimate the overall PR of lowland puddled soils of Sri Lanka through the assessment of bulk soil parameters. It was hypothesized that these significant relationships could be utilized to asses overall PR of the puddled soils
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