The direct sowing system brings many benefits to the environment and also reduction in production costs, since operations such as plowing, subsoiling, chiseling and harrowing are unnecessary. However, there are many problems regarding compaction of the surface layers of soils due to machinery traffic and crop-livestock integration. The solution found by the farmers is the change of the double disc on the seeders for the shanks, which operate deeper. Therefore, this work aimed to evaluate different operation depths of the shank, analyzing the fuel consumption, traction force, slip index, draw-bar leverage, specific consumption of fuel and the theoretical field capacity of a tractor pulling a seeder-fertilizer over a soil compacted due to crop-livestock integration. The treatments were composed of four depths of the shanks, which were placed operating 100, 150, 200 and 250 mm deep. The experiments were carried out in randomized blocks design with four treatments and three repetitions at the Engineering Department of the Federal University of Lavras. The results showed that the increasing of operation depth of the shanks in a compacted soil increases the fuel consumption, the slip index and the leverage on the draw-bar. But when the shanks operated 50 mm beyond the most compacted layer, the traction force and the slip index have decreased, increasing the theoretical field capacity.
Operational performance; crop-livestock integration; soil compaction
