The purpose of the presented study is a quantitative assessment of the influence of the rows of tillage implements, using the example of steam cultivators, on their technological, operational and economic characteristics. An analysis of the data from the test reports of these implements showed that the most common three-row cultivators provided slightly worse performance than two- and four-row ones. At the same time, it was found that there is a direct relationship between the row and working width of cultivators. Two-row and four-row cultivators provided approximately equal quality of work in terms of such indicators as deviation from the specified cultivation depth (1.1-1.2 cm); degree of crumbling (91.7-92.2 %) and ridges (2.3 cm) of the field surface. The shift time utilization coefficient for two- and three-row implements (0.73-0.74) is noticeably lower than that for four-row implements (0.82), which can be indirectly explained by the fact that such implements are indeed less clogged with vegetation. remains and soil in comparison with analogues, however, it is not clear why such an effect is not observed when comparing two- and three-row tools. The specific fuel consumption of MTA with cultivators of different rows is approximately the same - 4.0 ... 4.1 kg / ha, i.e. from the energy point of view, the advantages of the multi-row tool layout are not obvious, which does not fully correspond to the earlier hypothesis about the lower clogging of multi-row tools. The material consumption of two-row guns (and hypothetically, the cost) is almost 1.1 times less than that of three-row ones, and almost 1.3 times less than four-row ones. At the same time, the increase in material consumption significantly exceeds the increase in the increase in the coefficient of use of the shift time. In general, the study conducted (on the example of steam cultivators) did not allow us to identify obvious advantages in terms of agrotechnical and energy indicators of the tendency to increase the rows of tillage implements, with the obvious disadvantage of this approach from a technical and economic point of view.