Performance of cotton residue collection machinery

Cotton is an important crop in Greece, covering more than 255,000 ha every year. Apart from the lint and seed, cotton produces large amounts of residues that can be used for energy production. The aim of this work was to study the performance of the machinery used for harvesting cotton residues. Conventional hay harvesting machinery was used for harvesting cotton residues in Central Greece. A mower, a rake and a baler were used for cutting, windrowing and baling cotton stalks, respectively. Data were collected from 41 fields. The performance of the farm machinery was recorded using low cost Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, which also acted as data loggers, placed on each tractor. Data analysis was performed using the MATLAB® technical programming language. The effective time and the field capacity were estimated for each operation. The effective time was 69% for cutting, 68% for windrowing and 60% for baling. The measured average field capacities were 2.64 ha h−1 (3.38 t h−1), 2.1 ha h−1 (2.76 t h−1), and 3.71 ha h−1 (4.47 t h−1), for the cutting, windrowing, and baling operations, respectively. These results are considerably different from the corresponding estimations for hay handling operations using existing available databases and software tools. This deviation reveals that average norms for the prediction of machinery performance during hay handling cannot be used for the scheduling of handling operations for cotton residues within the bioenergy production supply chain.