Paddy Harvesting Machinery

Recent years, agriculture has become one of the complicated ways of living.  It is constantly battered by climate changes, middleman and dearth of field labourers. This situation is no different in our village. The labourers demand high perks with breakfast & lunch as complement. The efficiency of labourers is also non-deterministic. They sometimes elude from work for trivial reasons. All these factors have forced paddy cultivators to embrace modernization. They have been attracted towards the paddy harvestor machineries which is perpetual in coastal Karnataka.

I had an opportunity this November to have closer look at the functioning of the machinery. Here is short highlight

• It costs ₹.2200 per hour (subject to change). This is almost equivalent to hiring labourers or may be slightly costlier. However there is no pain of feeding and monitoring labourers.
• The machine is rented from local contractor who rents from a vendor in TamilNadu
• The machine can harvest an acre of land in one hour.
• The paddy is separated from straw and stored in machine buffer. Capacity is not known to me. Don't worry, the lubrication of machine do not stick to hay!
• The buffered paddy is channelled from the outlet present at the side of harvester towards local storage.
• The hay is cut rather than being left as whole. This turns out disadvantageous to the cultivators since the buyers measure only in terms of bundle of uncut hay.
• The other not so disadvantageous factor is that if straws are stuck in between rollers, a manual intervention is required to clear them.
• Despite the advantage of obtaining cut hays, the consumers are hesitant to buy this stock.
• Most of the times, the cultivators sell them at lower prices. There is also a machinery available which separates the hay uncut. I am yet to experience it.
• If many cultivators adopt this type of harvesting, the machinery rental  prices may come down. Also the haystack price would turn to normal rates.

Signing off, do watch a short video if you are not familiar with the process. Sorry, I forgot to capture paddy draining action. At the end, my body (including camera) was spattered with hay dust which I cleaned at home :).