EFFICIENCY OF USING SELF-PROPELLED SPRINKLER EQUIPPED WITH THE SYSTEM OF AUTOMATIC GUIDING

Abstract

Precision agriculture reduces the cost for fertilizers, seeds, plant protection products, and petrol, oil, and lubricants by an average of 20%. Currently, the market of the Republic of Kazakhstan also offers various elements of precision agriculture systems, such as parallel and automatic guidance systems, seed control, yield mapping, differentiated application of mineral fertilizers and plant protection agents, and a GPS-tracker with a fuel level sensor. At the same time, the possibilities of obtaining efficiency from the use of precision agriculture systems in certain conditions of their use have not been fully studied yet.The article presents the results of comparative tests of a self-steering sprayer for chemical weeding of wheat and flax crops in Northern Kazakhstan. The method of conducting comparative tests was based on the requirements of state standards. When conducting comparative tests, their conditions, agrotechnical, energetic, operational, technological and economic indicators of a self-steering sprayer equipped with an automatic guidance system and without a system were determined. The use of the GPS navigation and automatic guidance systems in the chemical weeding of grain and oil crops increases productivity by 14.6 %, reduces specific energy consumption by 8 %, fuel consumption by 17 %, and working fluid consumption by 14.5 %. In such a case, total money costs are reduced by 9 %, and the annual saving of total money costs amounts to 6562.6 tenges (1093.7 rubles).

Keywords

• comparative tests
• precision agriculture
• automatic guiding
• chemical weeding
• navigation system