Timeliness of harvest often takes precedence over other factors such as the optimal moisture content needed for reduced breakage or lower filed losses.
All grain from paddy and wheat must be effectively stripped from the whole plant stem: gram, mustard, pigeon pea, lentil and soybean must be threshed for seed from the plants; peanuts must be threshed of picked from the vines: and corn must be shelled from the cob. Therefore harvesting can be defined as the process by which grains and oilseeds are removed from a plant, gathered and physically removed from a field.
These activities are accomplished by machines that cut, thresh, screen, clean, bind, pick and shell the crops in the field.
Harvesting also includes loading harvested crops into trucks and transporting crops in the grain field.
These functional elements are put together to form a successful machine called a combine roller.
Such machine are quite large, requiring a high-capacity power source besides requiring large fields, highly skilled operators and technicians to use and maintain them.
Large amounts of abrasion and breakage may occur as a result of threshing, augering, and impaction when harvested by combine, followed by transfer from combine to grain trucks with subsequent transfer to farm storage.
Current harvesting technology provides combines capable of obtaining low grain damage levels and reduced foreign material with acceptable losses.
The major advance in this area is through new control systems and automation.
Harvest technology of grains
