Study of the Soil Moisture Content and the Tractor Speed on the Performance Efficiency of the Machinery Unit

A field experiment was conducted in the experiment fields of the college of agriculture Abu ghraib Baghdad University, 2016 in a silt clay loam soil , to study the effect of soil moisture content and the speed of the tractor on some tractor performance indicators and some of soil physical characteristics, ArmaTrac 845e and ITM 285 New tractor with sweep plough as a machinery unit were used in this study .Two soil moisture content under 18 20 % and 14 16 % which represented main plot, Three types of plough included : moldboard , chisel and sweep which represented subplot, five levels of foreword speeds of tractor included : 1.5 , 2.53 , 3.75 , 5.3 and 6.71 km / hr which represented sub-subplot. Slippage percentage, Pull force, Effective field capacity, soil moisture level and soil bulk density were measure in this experiment. Split-split plot with complete randomized block design with three replication were used in this study, and Least significant differences (LSD) was used to compare the means of treatments at 0.05 levels. The obtained results, for the range of tests, showed that the Reducing soil moisture content from 18 20 % to 14 16 % caused decreasing slippage percentage by 31.34 % and force pull by 26.14 % and the low value of soil bulk density from 1.25 g/cm3 to 1.24 g/cm3 and low soil moisture level by 20.92 % to 18.76 % and increased effected field capacity by 12.5 %. Increased tractor speed operation led to increase the percentage of slippage and force pull and production field and soil bulk density and the weighted reduce soil moisture level. The interaction between soil moisture content 14 16 % and the speed 1.5 km/hr got a less percentage of slippage 6.36 % and less force pull 6.26 kN and less soil bulk density 1.12 g/cm3, And the interaction between soil moisture content 14 16 % and speed 6.71 km/hr got higher value of the effective field capacity 1.57 he/hr, And the interaction between soil moisture content 18 20 % and the speed 1.5 km/hr gave a higher soil moisture level 21.25 %.