MODELLING FIELD WORKABLE DAYS ON FERRALSOLS IN CAMEROON

The absence of accurate field operation time records may result to wasteful use of the time available for farm operation which reduces the possibility of a successful operation. Making decisions related to whether or not the soil is suitable for farm activities is essential. However, about 70% of Cameroons soils are ferralsols and there is little to no data on how they respond to pressure from farm machinery intensities at different levels of moisture content. For the Bimodal Humid Forest Agroecological Zone of Cameroon, a model was developed to estimate soil suitability and the effective time available for farm operations on ferralsols. To achieve this goal, pot and field experiments were carried out to observed how bulk densities changes under different traffic intensities at various soil moisture levels. Also, NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) was used to develop a model in JAVA language that isran by a desktop. It was found thatferralsols have four main types of soil texture: Sandy Clay Loam, Clay, Sandy Clay, Clay Loam.Also, compaction caused by farm machinery traffic in these soils at depths of 0-15 cm tends to be greater than that at depths of 15-40 cm, which did not vary much moisture content at wilting point (MCWP) was found to be between 10% and 15%, and critical moisture content (CMC) ranged from 25.88% to 38.32%. Furthermore, ferralsols reach their optimum bulk density at moisture contents higher than field capacity. The NGUTRACT model developed permits to determine if a day was workable or not based on several variables and consequently permit to determine the number of days in a year. As a result, the model is site-specific, and depending on the soil type and moisture content, a day may be workable for one farmer while being non-workable for another in the same location.However, in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the entire agroecological zone, the results should be extended to the East and South regions. NGUTRACT should be used in conjunction.