Prediction of Effective Field Capacity in Forage Harvesting and Disk Harrowing Operations

Planning and implementing an efficient machinery management system requires the availability of approximate data on the effective field capacity of the machinery used in farming operations. This article presents an analysis of disk harrowing and forage harvesting operations aimed at obtaining models that yield values that are as close as possible to real values without the need to conduct in situ tests every time an operation is performed. Parameters such as field area, field shape, and field slope presumably affect the performance of the operations. Particularly, field shape affects the number of turns made during field operations. In order to build a model, the different field shapes must be assigned numerical values that define the degree of difficulty of the operations involved in cultivation. Assigning these numerical values to field shapes is the main difficulty in building the model. In this study, we tested various shape indices and determined the performance of the shape indices using linear regression models. The analyzed models produced substantially better results for forage harvesting than for disk harrowing. The models presented here are considered valid to achieve the level of accuracy required for forage harvest planning. In contrast, for disk harrowing, our models have verified that the number of turns largely explains the performance of the operation, but the efforts to associate the number of turns with the shape indices developed have not produced the expected results.