Background:
In the field bunch crops such as soybean, black gram, green gram, etc. pods are distributed nearer to the ground surface and/or throughout the plant. It leads to higher harvesting losses during harvesting by conventional machines. These losses increase manifold in late harvesting due to untimely rain which restricts entry of heavy harvesting machinery in the field. In the case of manual harvesting of crops requires 18-25 man-days/ha and harvested crops are collected at one place on the field and after sun drying it was threshed by the thresher. Whereas reapers only reduce manpower for cutting the crop additional manpower is required for the collection of the harvested crop at one point for threshing, which leads to additional labor requirement and collection losses:
Technology Details:
Considering the labour shortage during the peak harvesting period, risk of damage to the crop due to untimely rains, short time availability for land preparation and sowing of Rabi season crop a tractor attachment i.e., integrated harvesting-cum-conveying machine with cutting width of 2120 mm and weight of 450 kg, was developed. The conveying of the harvested crop was done by a conveyor belt, which reduces the machine crop interaction to the minimum and also saves the straw (bhusa). The harvesting of soybean, black gram, and green gram by the harvester for bunch-type field crops can be done at the average height of cut, field capacity, and field efficiency were 66-80 mm, 0.248 ha/h and 78 %, respectively at a forward speed of 0.42 m/s. The harvesting losses were in the range of 1.5-2.9 % for soybean, black gram, and green gram. The integrated harvesting-cum-conveying system can give economic benefits and time savings of 49.4 % and 60.4 % respectively, in comparison to the manual harvesting of bunch crops by sickle.