Combine Harvester- An All-Rounder Agricultural Machinery

One of the best Farm Equipment

What is combine harvester?

For increasing efficiency with an affordable budget, farmers look for machinery that helps them handle multiple tasks with the same machine. A combine harvester is one of the all-rounder farm equipment that allows farmers to do different tasks in their field with one machine such as harvesting, threshing, etc.

Different types of agricultural machinery and farm tools are contributing to the industrial growth of the agricultural and farming sectors. The modern combine harvester is one such machinery and has contributed largely to increasing the production and efficiency of the farms. There have been some great technological changes in the agriculture sector leading to an increase in farm modernization. 

Combine harvester also called combine is just not famous among large farm owners but also among small and medium-sized farmland owners. The machines are offered in different sizes which makes them suitable for any requirement.

How the combine harvester was born:

The giant machine we are seeing today, started out as a simple design of a bell machine in Patrick Bell's mind in 1826. Then, in 1835, Hiram Moore, United States, designed the first combine harvester which was pulled by horse or ox teams. In India, the first combine was made in 1970 which revolutionized the development in Indian farms. A number of conceptions, blueprints, designs, fiascos, and successes later, the epitome of peak efficiency, today’s combine harvester was born.

Here we have mentioned the key benefits of using a combined harvester –

Combine Harvester Operation:

Combine harvester parts:

The technicalities involved in combine harvester are not just limited to the different components but also the profundity involved in its operation, functioning. Made up of about twenty-one parts including header, reel, cutter bar, sieves, rotating blades, grain tank, unloading pipe, augers, conveyors, belts, layers, wheels etc. This agricultural implementas are used to harvest and thresh crops like rice, corn, wheat, sunflower, pulses, barley etc.

These crops are only partly edible and the inedible parts along with their stalks need to be eliminated. Earlier, the farmers’ main tool was their hands, along with other gears, with which they used to cut, thresh (separating the edible from the inedible) and clean the grains in different parts. This not only used a lot of labour time and effort but also slowed down the overall productivity.

How combine harvester works:

Saying its last goodbye to heavy tools like scythe, sickle, the Indian farmers adapted this suave farm machinery, of which the header platform emerges as the main feature. The header at the front of the machine gathers the cereal crops which are pushed towards the cutter bar by pick-up reel.

The crops are then cut down by the cutter and are gathered by the revolving reel. Going through the conveyor to the threshing area, the cut crops are shaken, broken until the grains are separated from the stalks. The grains and stalks have distinct futures and meant to go their separate ways where the grains are collected in a tank via the sieve which waits to be later unloaded onto a truck and stalks along with the other unwanted stuff are passed towards the back of the machine. Which waits to be later thrown away on a wide area they were harvested from.

Timely harvesting

Harvesting is a time taking crucial process that any kind of delay can create a risk for the mature crops. A combine harvester only takes hours to harvest acres of land, while manual harvesting takes weeks to harvest a few acres only.

Saves the cost of harvesting -

Modern combine allows farmers to harvest their crops using the least labor along with generating better yielding opportunities. Thus, no need to worry about the process of hiring laborers, watching them at work, and paying high in the season as per the demand. A farmer can drive the harvester or can hire a skilled laborer who has knowledge of operating the machine.

The quality of the crop is the main concern for farmers when it comes to earning the maximum out of their farms, the better the quality, the higher the cost is offered in the market. Grains harvested with the combine harvester are comparatively better in quality than manual harvesting as all the harvesting operations are conducted inside the machine from cutting to separating the chaff.

Farmers have to incur a huge cost in the harvesting process but using the exact size and type of the combined harvester, the cost of harvesting can be minimized. A suitable harvester of a known brand can lead to cost minimization and more profits for the large farmers as well as small farmers.

A combined harvester needs vast investment, thus a farmer should always choose the best harvester per his requirements.