The Hindu Business Line : Untimely rains no problem... there's harvester combine

FIRST, it was the abnormal rise in temperatures during March that caused the wheat crop in large parts of northern India to mature 10-15 days in advance. The result - a drop in per hectare yields, ranging from 500 kg to one tonne.

Now, it is the turn of unseasonal rains and hailstorms - rendering it the coolest and wettest late-April, early-May periods in recent memory - to threaten further loss of crop.

But according to Agriculture Ministry officials, the damage arising from the latest episode of climate anarchy is ``minimal''. And for this, the credit goes to technology. Technology, that has made a real difference to ordinary farmers in recent times.

Consider this. Till the 1960s, farmers used to manually harvest wheat, using sickles, which required 18-19 man-days (i.e. five workers employed over 3-4 days) to cover a single hectare. The wheat that was harvested had to be further threshed to separate the grain from the straw.

Traditionally, this used to be done by bullock treading and manual winnowing. It would take over a week for a pair of bullocks, yoked to a phala (threshing frame), to tread out the produce of a hectare. After that, the grain was separated from the chaff by being thrown into the air by pitchforks. The hot winds prevailing at that point would carry the dry chaff to a distance. The grain that fell on the threshing-floor was then cleaned using a chhaji or winnowing basket.

As a result, the threshing season would typically extend to mid-July, with a good part of the crop being damaged even by timely monsoons. The situation improved in the 1970s with the introduction of power threshers.

According to one estimate, the replacement of the sickle harvesting-bullock treading-manual winnowing system by sickle harvesting-cum-power threshing reduced the total labour requirement from about 37 man-days and seven bullock-pair days to slightly over 30 man-days. The thresher could also cover one hectare in about 12 hours.

But the harvester combine's advent since the 1980s has radically altered the equation. A combine can harvest, thresh and clean one hectare of wheat - all at one go - in less than two hours. Today, well over three-fourths of the paddy and wheat in Punjab, Haryana and the Tarai region of Uttar Pradesh is harvested by combines, which farmers custom hire for around Rs 1,000 per hectare. In other areas, the crop is sickle-harvested and threshed by power threshers operated by tractors, diesel engines or electric motors. While the latter system involves higher costs - Rs 1,500 per hectare on manual harvesting and another Rs 2,000 on threshing - it, however, enables four times higher straw recovery and better quality of bhusa (chaff).

``Whether combines or power threshers, what mechanisation has ensured is that the country's entire wheat gets harvested and threshed by mid-May. And since the harvesting this time round commenced about 10 days ahead of the normal mid-April time, the bulk of the crop would have been threshed before the recent untimely rains", the Director-General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Dr Mangala Rai, told Business Line.

At the same time, there are some areas in UP, he admitted, where farmers have harvested the wheat, which is lying unthreshed in the fields. The quality of this grain may suffer from discolouration.

But as on April 30, a total quantity of 152.95 lakh tonnes of wheat has already arrived in the country's major mandis, of which 144.74 lt has been procured by FCI and State agencies.

This is almost equal to the 158.02 lt that was bought during the entire 2003-04 rabi marketing season (April-June). With total food grain stocks of 206.47 lt as on April 1, 2004 - 130.69 lt of rice, 69.31 lt of wheat and 6.47 lt of coarse grains - the Government will have a sufficient buffer to meet domestic consumption requirements in the months ahead, officials added.

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