Quality of sown seed placement over the field area. Part 3. Method of determining the quality of seed (plant) placement over a field area

Methodological support for research and testing of seeding machines is the most im-portant aspect in developing a decision on the feasibility of decisions on adopting design and technological schemes for new machines and using new working bodies. The overwhelming majority of existing methods are of a private nature and are intended for work within a narrow range of seeding rates or spatial condi-tions. These methods often propose criteria that do not have a clear physical meaning and characterize the seed and plant placement only indirectly. The methods are labor-intensive and difficult to implement, re-quire complex and expensive equipment for obtaining and processing experimental data. All this taken to-gether complicates the development of the necessary decisions on creating the desired seeding structure, and as well as, the design of the new machine and the options for the working bodies used. This is the main reason that the designs of new machines usually are copies of previously created samples, inhibiting the development of new, more productive crop production technologies. The article proposes a method for assessing the quality of plant placement in the field and sown seeds in the laboratory as a variant of dis-tributing a discrete value in two-dimensional space. Collection of primary information and processing of ex-perimental data are reduced to simple actions and simple calculation of placement indicators. The obtained data reflect the spatial conditions of plant placement as a result of the sowing operation. Variants of the method for different seeding rates and sowing designs have been developed and proposed – for large and small seed flow rates. The standard approach to determining the quality of plant placement is based on a comparison of the ideal and actual placement options, which ensures the uniformity of the obtained as-sessments and allows comparing different options for creating a crop structure.