Study on the Development of Agricultural Machines for Small-Scale Farmers, Part 2 (Applied Technology to the Improvement of an Animal-Drawn Plow for Morocco and Africa)

摘要

The purpose of this research is to improve the working performance of the animal-drawn plow for small-scale farmers in Africa, as based on conditions in Morocco. Animal-traction farming is not widespread in Africa, except in a few regions. Furthermore, tractor cultivation is still difficult for small-scale farmers due to economic constraints and the need for shared use of machines, which involves solving operational, technical and maintenance problems. The plowing depth with seed-covering cultivationis about 10 cm on the dry land of Morocco. Traction forces are, therefore, low during actual operation. As a result, stable operation of animal-drawn plows and subsequent reduction of the workload on the draft animals are being sought for farming operations. The minimizing of the standard deviation (SD) of measured data (amplitude of ranges) of the draft force was selected as the performance evaluation parameter for stable and efficient handling and for steady operation. Throughout these experiments contributing most to the uniformity of plow performance the longest plow sole (51 cm) turned out to be the element when draft force, required horsepower, stepping reduction rate, and operational stability were considered.