POWER AND ENERGY REQUIREMENTS OF AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY DRIVEN BY TRACTOR USED ON GREENHOUSE VEGETABLE PRODUCTION IN TURKEY

Power and energy requirement data is often used in machinery management. Farm system models often require power data to predict machine performance and fuel requirement. As seen in previous researches, many studies on the subject of power and energy requirements mostly concentrated on field crops production. However, the investigations related to energy use in greenhouse vegetable production are very limited. Turkey is an important state of protected cultivation in the Mediterranean area. This research was carried out in Antalya province which is in the centre of Turkey's greenhouse vegetable production. In greenhouse areas, mostly vegetables are cultivated in soil culture. In this research, power and energy requirements for agricultural machinery used for greenhouse vegetable production were determined and compared with the machinery used for field crop productions. In the production, some agricultural machinery is used in tillage and transportation operations like mouldboard plough, chisel, cultivator, rotary tiller and trailer driven by tractor. In greenhouse experiments, basic operational data are measured by a computer based data acquisition system. According to the results, the forward speeds of tillage machines, determined between 1.6 and 2.0 km/h, were lower than that of farm machinery used in field crops. Total power requirements of tillage machines were between 7.1-14.5 kW and that of trailer was 18.4 kW. Energy requirement of the rotary tiller (80.6 kW-h/ha) was greater than for the other tillage machines. The energy requirement values of moldboard plough, chisel and cultivator were 46.9, 38.2 and 30.9 kW-h/ha, respectively. Energy requirement per material mass during transportation operation was calculated as 0.53 kW-h/t.