Comparison of the effectiveness of various soil crust breakers for mechanical control of soil crust

For a successful plant cultivation, first of all, it is necessary to obtain suitable conditions for the seeds to germinate and emergence in the soil. The formation of soil crust is one of the most important factors affecting this process negatively. If the crust layer has formed once after the seeding, this layer should be properly broken using various agricultural machinery. This method, called mechanical control, is one of the most effective method to cope with crust layer. In practice, it is unclear which equipment should be used for the crust breaking process and the crust breaking efficiency of the currently used equipment. In this thesis, in order to contribute to the elimination of the deficiency in practice, the formation of the crust layer was ensured after cotton seeding and the crust breaking process was carried out using 3 different crust breakers (star gear type, horizontal finger roller and slide type). Then, the effects of each crust breaker on crust breaking activities and seedling emergence were evaluated. According to the results of the research, it has been determined that all three machines can be used effectively in terms of crust breaking, the horizontal finger type crust breaker has the highest effect on seedling emergence for the experiments carried out on Aksu Research and Application Farm of Faculty of Agriculture, Akdeniz University. There wasn't significant difference between the gear type and the slide type, statistically. According to the results of the experiments conducted in a field in the Kampüs Research and Application Farm of Faculty of Agriculture, Akdeniz University, it was concluded that there wasn't significant difference between the soil crust breakers, statistically.