Soil translocation resulting from multiple passes of tillage under normal field operating conditions

Until now, most tillage erosion experiments were conducted under controlled soil and operating conditions. However, soil condition, tillage depth, speed and direction generally show substantial within-field variation. In this study, a series of tillage experiments were set up to investigate the erosivity of tillage under normal operating conditions. The effect of a typical tillage sequence, including multiple mouldboard, chisel and harrow passes, on soil translocation and tillage erosion was studied during a period of 3 years. Soil translocation in excess of 10 m was observed while the average net translocation rates ranged between 0 and 0.9 m. The results suggest that the annual tillage transport coefficient, associated with mechanized agriculture, is in the order of 781 kg m−1 yr−1. The experimental results also show that the tillage transport coefficient of a sequence of tillage operations can be reasonably well predicted from information provided by the farmer and by summing the transport coefficients obtained from controlled, single pass experiments. However, a Monte Carlo simulation showed that a relatively high number of tillage operations are required to obtain accurate estimates of the tillage transport coefficients in multiple pass experiments.