What is a Combine Harvester?
A combine harvester is a very useful agricultural machine that can harvest, winnow, and thresh rice, corn, wheat, sunflower, pulses, and other crops in the field. Harvesting crops through a given manner in one operational process can save time as well as human labour, and bring down work costs for farmers. Besides, these machines can improve agricultural output since the harvesting worked out more efficiently, and this, in turn, can make farming more productive.
How does it work?
The significant specialty of a combine harvester is the detachable header platform that has cutters to cut crops and a revolving reel to gather the cut crops into the bit. The header platform may be of a standard type or a specialized type. Different header platforms are useful to harvest various types of crops.
Advantages:
Small combine harvesters machines are suitable for the Indian Agrarian conditions, where farm sizes are comparatively small, and terrain types can range considerably.
Combine harvesters are useful for various kinds of areas, dry or wet. They can be applied to tracks to make it increasingly helpful to swim through water-submerged fields to gather rice.
Indian farmers can support their joint reapers with a particular gear called the Super-Straw Management System to expel stubble from their fields. It spares them from consuming the stubble, and that excludes air contamination.
Combine harvesters and Indian Farmers?
Combine harvesters can be very costly, with prices running to 20 lakhs and more, and this would take them out of the ambit of many small farmers. The Indian government currently grants subsidies of up to 40% of the investment price to encourage Indian farmers to use more of these machines for more efficient farming. Even with such available offers though, these machines may still be unaffordable for many Indian farmers with relatively small land-holdings.
It may make more economic sense for Indian farmers, who are unable to purchase the machines, to hire combine harvesters from custom-hiring entrepreneurs as and when they need them. Generally, the farmers only need to use combine-harvesters during the harvest season. And, since they are only hiring them for a short period, they don’t have to bear the maintenance costs of the machines or have to set aside a season to store the combine harvester when they are not in use.
Indian farmers often hoist small tractors on top of combine harvesters with lifts and use them to drive the harvesters to boost efficiency.
Combine harvester sales in India are still small as compared to tractor sales. It may have something to do with the fact that unlike tractors. Farmers can shop nearby for many different models for many many plans, only a limited number of combine harvester models are available, and many of these are very costly to buy for many Indian farmers. Also, in terms of promotion, combine harvesters don’t yet receive the amount of advertising that tractors get in India.
