Performance evaluation of gender friendly manually operated harvester for weat crop

Abstract

Harvesting constitutes one of the most time consuming and laborious operations of farming as it is done mainly with sickles, despite all its deficiencies, in the absence of suitable/improved harvesting equipment. Manual harvesting is a cumbersome job and requires about 180 to 200 man h/ha to harvest a crop. However, gender friendly manually operated harvester perform maximum field capacity was obtained with 1.65 km h-1 but, the losses at this speed were higher. So average speed of 1.5 km h-1 is recommended for operation. The average power required for pushing the machine was 106.74 to 137.69 N for wheat crop and 113.66 to 137.8 N for rice crop respectively. The effective field capacity of the machine was found to be 0.042 ha h-1 at forward speed of 1.5 km h-1 for wheat crop. The field capacity was 70.00 per cent. The result showed that the field capacity of the machine compare to hand sickle was found to be 5.64 times higher of the machine.