Quality of placing sowed seeds over the field area. Part 2. Empirical method of assessing the quality of placing sowed seeds over the area of arable land

A methodical approach to determining and calculating the quality indicators of agricultural machinery process is an important part of the research and testing of seeding machinery. The previous article raised the issues of developing an empirical method for determining the quality of seed placement and subsequent plants. The development of a method is necessary to obtain information about the process quality of placing seeds or plants over the field area and to analyze various influencing factors. The method is based on comparing the variant of ideal plant placement with the distribution obtained by seeding machinery. It is proposed to consider the «distribution by squares» as a standard or ideal distribution. It means when plants are located in the center of the site, the size of which is equal to the size of the feeding area of one plant in a square configuration. The totality of such areas is ordered and represented as a structured part of the field area. There have been chosen average and criteria from the standpoint of a statistical approach. The possible occupancy coefficient was chosen as a criterion. It is the ratio of nutrition areas number in the surveyed area to plants number in the same area. The next selected indicator is the coefficient of actual area filling. It is the ratio of occupied nutrition areas to the number of plants that have sprung up, which shows the rationality of the chosen method of placing seeds or plants. Next, the indicators of the conditions provided to plants for crop production were selected. They are the specific load (the average number of plants in the occupied specific nutrition areas) and the average size of the actual nutrition area without taking into account its configuration. A comprehensive indicator combining the proposed quality criteria, showing the proportion of rationally used area under sowing, is proposed to adopt field area usage factor.