Quality of mechanically harvested soybeans with cutting platforms in areas with and without dessiccation

Abstract

Soybean harvesting is one of the most important stages of the crop's production cycle and the increasing use of more complex technologies in agricultural machinery is linked to its success. The use of desiccants to anticipate the harvest has helped in the grain harvest. The objective of this work was to qualitatively evaluate the harvest of desiccated and non-desiccated soybeans using machines with two different cutting platforms: conventional and draper. The experiment was carried out in the municipality of Nova Crixás - GO, in a completely randomized design, in a 2x2 factorial arrangement, with two harvesters with different types of cutting platform (conventional and draper) and two management of the area (desiccated and non-desiccated), using four replicates per treatment. The analyzed variables were: purity, mass of a thousand seeds, water content of the grains, germination, cracked grains, broken grains, bandinha grains and whole grains. There was no interaction between variable variables. The draper cutting platform provided better physical and regulatory qualities of soybeans than the conventional platform model (snail). Desiccated soybeans showed better results compared to non-desiccated soybeans. Due to having a period of 5 more days of dry matter accumulation, non-dried soybeans had a mass of 1,000 grains greater than dried soybeans. However, when comparing their results of cracked and broken grains, they do not enable the soybean harvest without the desiccation process, avoiding such losses.