Combine Harvester - An Overview

 

The crops farmers grow in the fields, such as barley, wheat, and rye, are partly edible. The seeds at the top of each plant also known as grain are used to make products like cereal and bread, but the dry coatings of the chaff are not edible and have to be discarded, with their stalks.

 

Before modern machines were developed, farmers had to harvest crops by carrying out many laborious operations one after another. Initially, they had to cut down the plants with a cutting tool like a scythe. Then, they had to separate the eatable grain from the non-edible chaff by hitting the cut stalks—the operation known as threshing. Lastly, they had to clean any left-over debris left from the seeds to make it suitable to use in a mill. This was all the time-consuming process done by a lot of people.

 

Gratefully, the modern combine machine or the multi-crop harvesters do the entire job automatically. A farmer merely drives them in an entire field of crops and the combine machine cut, thresh and clean the grains all together themselves using wheels, rotating blades, sieves, and elevators. The grain assembles in a container inside the combine harvester and periodically emptied into wagons hauled by tractors that drive alongside. Whereas the dry coatings of the seeds and the stalks spurt from a large exit pipe at the back and fall behind onto the field. 

Modern harvester has made it easy the crucial job of harvesting to a great extent, adding to the efficiency of any farm business and providing greater profits farmers in India and worldwide.

Combine Harvester — An Overview & Importance in Agriculture

A combine harvester is one of the most significant and versatile farm machinery that plays a very crucial role at harvesting time. Harvesting is the most important part of farming operation for farmers that grow grain crops as all their hard work pays off at this time. From cutting to separating grains from the chaff is a challenging process and needs to be done very carefully maintain the quality of grains.

Harvesting is done in different steps from reaping or cutting to threshing and separating grains. Earlier all these operations used to be done manually. Some small farm owners even today get all these activities done by the human labour or different machines for different tasks like thresher and winnowing machines. 

But large scale producer and commercial farmers prefer using combine harvesters to get best outcomes and to avoid damaging the quality of grains. Many farmers use a combine harvester in India as well for harvesting of different types of grain crops like wheat, rice, corn, soybean etc. Below we have mentioned some advantages of using a combine harvester for commercial and large-scale farming –

·    A Combine harvester lets a farmer to complete harvesting in minimum time even in the largest farms.

·         A farmer can save the labour cost by using a combine machine for harvesting.

·         A multi-crop harvester India is most suitable for farmers who grow various types of grains.

·         A multi-crops harvester is compatible for harvesting different grain crops.

·         Timely harvesting saves the crops from any damage by natural disasters like unseasonal rains, hailstorm and floods. The agriculture sector including crops like cereal, pulses, vegetable and fruit etc. has to face approximately twenty-two percent of the economic loss caused by several medium to large-scale natural disasters in developing countries like India. A farmer can only take some precautions to save him from such losses by natural disaster as there is no control over it.

• It is also seen that the quality of grains gathered by a combine harvester remains better than the grains harvested manually by labours. Even the markets offer quite high prices for the grains collected by a harvester machine.

With the increasing mechanization in agriculture, farmers are using new methods of farming and upgrading themselves with the use of modern technology-based farm equipment for higher productivity and safety in the fields. We can say that a combine harvester is one of the most modern agricultural machinery that not only minimizes the hard work for a farmer but also saves his time by letting them accomplish harvesting in minimum time.