Abdollah Hayati; Afshin Marzban; Majid Rahnama
Abstract
Introduction Date fruit production has an important position in either Iran or the world. Life and economy of many of people who live in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) depend on this agricultural product. Date palm crown access, as one of important operations of date fruit production, is performed ...
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Introduction Date fruit production has an important position in either Iran or the world. Life and economy of many of people who live in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) depend on this agricultural product. Date palm crown access, as one of important operations of date fruit production, is performed in a traditional manner with a tool talked “Parvand” yet. It results in various ergonomic and safety problems, such as fall from height, sunstroke, and musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). Meanwhile, mechanization could not adequately adopted by date palm growers. Possibly, ergonomic interventions in forms of simple tools mitigate ergonomic and safety problems in date palm crown access operation.Materials and Methods In this study, some ergonomic interventions were investigated to improve the present status of ergonomic and safety status of this operation with employing nine workers from Ramshir city, Khuzestan province, Iran. Evaluated date palm climbing tools were as follows: Parvand (traditional tool), Parvand+rubber shoes (intervened tool), harness (intervened tool), and harness+rubber shoes (intervened tool). Parvand consisted of a backrest and a towing wire. In two last mentioned intervened tools, harness was replaced with backrest in Parvand. Indeed, harness was the brief name of composition of harness and towing wire. Comparisons were done based on some ergonomic, safety, bio-mechanical, and technical indices. Ergonomic evaluations included physical and cognitive ones. Body discomfort (BD), heart rate (HR), worker energy expenditure (EE), working oral temperature (OT), and physiological strain index (PSI) were the physical indices. Perception-based heat Strain Index (PeSI) and acceptance of climbing tools in view of workers were the cognitive Indices. Acceptance comprised workers’ perception about safety, work speed, ease of use, technical properties, and preference of the tools. Safety evaluation was conducted using failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) which resulted in a risk priority number (RPN) for each climbing tools. Bio-mechanical evaluations were performed using 3DSSPP software (to find the compression and shear forces on L5/S1 disc) and the investigation of mechanical stresses of Parvand and harness (to achieve the factor of safety (FoS) of tools). Technical index was the total time cycle (TTC) to perform date palm crown access (install climbing tool, ascending, and descending). Statistical analysis was conducted using IBM SPSS 24. During evaluation, workers’ qualitative feedbacks around intervened tools were recorded.Results and Discussion Mean age, height, mass and body mass index of workers were 33.1 years, 1.71 m, 74.0 kg, and 25.3 kg/m2, respectively. According to the statistical analyses, there was no any significant difference among climbing tools regarding BD, HR, EE, OT, PSI, PeSI, RPN, and TTC. Bio-mechanical evaluations showed that all four climbing tool caused a low risk compression force on L5/S1 (<3400), whereas interventions including harness were significantly higher than those including Parvand. Traditional and Parvand+rubber shoes with shear forces of 1120.9 and 1119.6 N, respectively, on L5/S1 disk resulted in high injury risk (>500 N) and were significantly higher than other two methods in which harness was used (p<0.001). FoS was achieved for Parvand and harness 1.21 and 3.53, respectively. Therefore, only harness could cover the minimum FoS required to work in height (2.4) according Ministry of Cooperative, Labor and Social Welfare’s regulations. During cognitive evaluations, harness+rubber shoes gained the highest safety level (score of 17) as well as the highest preference level (score of 14), whilst, Parvand+rubber shoes had the highest cognitive-based acceptance score (score of 58). Workers’ qualitative feedbacks, in order of frequency, were as follow: harness ropes should be wider (33%); towing wire-harness joint should be upper (from pelvis toward waist) (22%); harness ropes should be softer (especially around the thighs) (22%); harness should be integrated (i.e. without rope, like a short) from pelvis to thighs (11%); rope buckle should be used so that harness is more easily-and fast worn (11%).Conclusion Safety and work speed can be two main factors in the preference of a date palm crown access tool. Overall, intervened tools had a better state concerning safety, whereas, the qualifications were almost equal considering ergonomics. Notwithstanding it, the intervened tools had the lacks around work speed and technical properties which should be amended. Besides the attempts for development of date palm mechanization, further studies may be conducted on intervened date palm climbing tools, especially harness+rubber shoes method, based on workers’ qualitative feedbacks to gain a more appropriated level.
Ahmad Daneshkhah; Mahmoud Ghasemi Nejad raeini; Mohammad Amin Asoodar; Afshin Marzban; Mokhtar Heidari
Abstract
AbstractIntroduction In recent decades, population growth has led to changes in dietary behavior and a significant increase in global demand for food production, which has led to the promotion of heavy use of agricultural land. water shortage in arid and semi-arid regions is one of the most important ...
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AbstractIntroduction In recent decades, population growth has led to changes in dietary behavior and a significant increase in global demand for food production, which has led to the promotion of heavy use of agricultural land. water shortage in arid and semi-arid regions is one of the most important factor that affect crops production. The use of different conservation tillage methods such as minimum tillage and the use of organic and inorganic mulch as methods used in sustainable agriculture, can reduce water and energy consumption in an agricultural system. Soil water affects plant growth and development. So that even a small change in soil water content can significantly change the productivity of crops. Soil cover or mulch is one of the management strategies to increase water use efficiency of agricultural products.Materials and Methods In this study, research was conducted to investigate the effect of conservation tillage methods and plasticulture patterns on water use efficiency and strawberry crop yield in 1398. The water use efficiency was calculated to assess the effects of tillage and plastic covers in the field. . The experiment was conducted using of factorial design in the form of randomized complete blocks with three replications. The plots included two types of tillage systems (conventional and conservation) and three methods of plastic cover (planting under plastic, over plastic and without plastic coverage). This experiment was performed in 18 plots with dimensions of 0.8×15 meters. 3 rows were planted in each plot. The distance between sub-plots was 75 cm as a ridge, the distance between main plots was 1 and a half meters and the distance between replicates was 2 meters. Water use efficiency (WUE) is one of the most important indicators for measuring agricultural water productivity. This index is actually the ratio of the amount of product produced per amount of water consumed (evaporation-transpiration) of the plant. In this definition, instead of evaporating and transpiration of the plant, the amount of water used in the field can be replaced and the amount of crop production per unit volume of water used in irrigation can be obtained. The higher this ratio, the better the water consumption.Results and Discussion The two factors of tillage and planting pattern only affected soil moisture content at a depth of 0-10 cm and no significant effect was observed between different treatments at a depth of 10-20 cm. Minimum tillage in the pre-irrigation and post-irrigation stages has the highest moisture content. Conventional tillage disturbs the soil more than minimum tillage, increasing pores and unevenness of the soil surface, thereby increasing surface evaporation. Planting pattern had the highest moisture content and over plastic planting pattern had the lowest moisture content. Plastic cover is a barrier that prevents soil water from evaporating and keeps the root zone moisture regime at more stable levels, thus reducing the need for irrigation and preventing physiological disorders related to nutrients and water. There is no significant difference between tillage factor in two levels of conventional and low tillage and only planting pattern at 1% level has a significant difference. Different planting patterns significantly affected strawberry yield. According to the comparison of the average, the highest yield was related to the planting pattern on plastic and the lowest was obtained on the planting pattern without plastic. Since the yield of strawberries in different tillage methods was not significantly different and in this study the same amount of water was used in different methods. Therefore, tillage methods had no significant effect on strawberry water productivity.Conclusion The data was shown that the use of conservation tillage and plasticulture increased soil moisture retention by 22% which is due to the prevention of evaporation of soil moisture by Plastic mulch and Plant residue cover and less soil disturbance in conservation tillage. Conservation tillage has no significant effect on strawberry yield due to the slow trend in changing soil properties, but plastic mulch increased strawberry yield by 31.71% due to the increase in soil moisture retention. Since the type of tillage did not have a significant effect on strawberry yield in this study, therefore, tillage does not have a significant effect on water use efficiency, but different planting patterns, due to affecting yield, significantly increase water use efficiency here.
Agricultural Machinery
Mohammad Amin Asoodar; Afshin Marzban; Fatemeh Afsharnia
Abstract
Introduction Wheat is the main food commodity of Iranian population and major cultivating crop, grown on nearly half of the country’s rain-fed area as well as one-third of the irrigated area. Despite the availability of high yielding cultivars for different climates, the average wheat grain yield ...
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Introduction Wheat is the main food commodity of Iranian population and major cultivating crop, grown on nearly half of the country’s rain-fed area as well as one-third of the irrigated area. Despite the availability of high yielding cultivars for different climates, the average wheat grain yield in the country is around 3527 kg ha-1. Lower wheat grain yield could be due to unavailability of recommended varieties seed, delay in planting, inappropriate planting methods, excess use of fertilizers and inefficient water management. Irrigated wheat production in arid and semi-arid regions of Iran is generally practiced under conventional tillage systems. Crop producers in southwestern part of Iran are traditionally using conventional tillage (plowing with moldboard plow followed by double disking) for cultivating various crops. Most of the farmers use grain drills for sowing wheat because of uniformity of planting depth as compared to seed spreaders. The aims of the study were to determine whether different methods of sowing, such as grain drills (followed by flooding irrigation), row crop planting, and combination of furrowers (75 and 60 cm) and seeders (12 cm of sowing space) alter the agronomic performance of winter wheat. Therefore, selection of suitable sowing method plays an important role in the placement of seed at proper depth, which ensures better emergence and subsequent crop growth. Material and methods The study was conducted on a silt clay loam soil (Carbonatic Typic Torrifluvent) in research farms of Ramin Agriculture and Natural Resources University, Ahvaz, Iran, with wheat-wheat- corn crop rotation. The soil was representative of a large area of arable land in the Khuzestan province. Conventional tillage was practiced by moldboard plow ( 25 cm depth) followed by disc harrow twice (nearly 10 cm depth). The two year experiment was conducted based on completely randomized block design in four replicates. 140 kg/ha of wheat (Triticum aestivum L), Chenab cultivar was sown at 50 mm depth for all treatments. The experimental treatments were 20 furrow opener rain drill with 12 cm line space (P), combination of grain drill-furrower (PF60 and PF75) with 60 and 75 cm furrow spaces, also furrower-grain drill (FP60 and FP75 cm) and furrower –grain drill with 3 planted rows on beds (FP3_60 and FP3_75 cm). Soil conductivity of the experimental field (plots) ranged from 1.2 to 3.3 ds mG. The soil texture was silty clay loam with the range of clay content from 34 to36%, and N, P and K contents of the soil were 0.8 to 1, 6.1 to 16.2 and 117 to 192 mg kgG, respectively. Results and discussion Wheat grain yield obtained from all treatments was different; however, harvested grain after FP_75 was the highest compared to others. The highest amount of yield was 5966.7 kg/ha for the first year and 5070 kg/ha for the second year compared to simple planting (P) which was the lowest (4883 and 4271 kg/ha respectively for 2 interval years). Analysis of variance for grain yield indicated that FP-75 had a significant difference (p < 0.01) as compared to others, but grain yield for furrow spaces from 60 to 75 cm was not significantly different. However, the use of furrowers showed significant effects on wheat grain yield. Crop yield and biomass were shown to be different where the furrow was made before sowing. The use of grain drills without furrowers had a great negative effect on crop biomass and grain yield. The results obtained from the second year were similar to the first year. The application of furrow before sowing showed maximum crop yield and biomass, so that the highest and the lowest biomass belonged to FP-75 with 14817 kg ha-1 and P with 11731 kg ha-1, respectively. The harvest index was not significantly different among treatments. Similar results were obtained in wheat plots after harvesting. Conclusion The overall results from this study indicated that the values of crop yield and biomass were maximum where the furrow was made before sowing, as FP-75 treatment had the highest yield. So regarding non-problem of soil salinity in the north of Khuzestan, the use of furrow before sowing can be considered as an appropriate tillage and sowing system for wheat production in the semi-arid region.
