The Hindu Business Line : Manual harvesting stages a comeback

OUT OF FAVOUR?: Harvester combines are a common sight in northern India at this time of the year. Combine owners take their machines right from Madhya Pradesh to Jammu, hiring them out to farmers for Rs 600- 650 an acre. A combine can harvest, thresh and clean the wheat crop of an acre within 45 minutes. - Ramesh Sharma

Ludhiana April 24 You could call it technology in the reverse.

Since the eighties, farmers in Punjab and Haryana have taken to combines in a big way, so much so that these machines harvest roughly three-fourths of the wheat and paddy grown in this premier granary belt.

"With a combine, I harvest, thresh and clean one acre of wheat in 35-40 minutes. The left-over stalks can be separately recovered using a straw reaper, which again covers an acre within an hour," says Mr Paramjit Lambardar, a 25-acre grower from Pohlo Majra village of Punjab's Fatehgarh Sahib district.

The usual practice for farmers is to custom hire the combines. "We charge them Rs 600-650 per acre. If straw reapers are used, it costs another Rs 500 per trolley. At 1.5 trolleys per acre, it comes to Rs 750," informs Mr Narender Singh, a combine-owner based at Nabha near Patiala.

Mr Singh is one of the many who takes his machine first to Madhya Pradesh, where wheat harvesting begins in end-February. From there, the combine goes to Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab and right up to Jammu by mid-May. "My main costs are diesel and labour. A combine worked for an hour consumes seven litres of diesel. If I engage a driver, he is paid a flat Rs 9,000 for the season plus an incentive of Rs 9 per acre. And we do 25-30 acres daily," he adds.

Before combines came into vogue, farmers manually harvested their crop using sickles. This was both costly and time-consuming. "In sickle harvesting, I require five men working from early morning to late night to cover an acre. If they are migrant Biharis, they have to be given Rs 1,200-1,300. In case of local labourers, the demand is 130 kg of wheat plus 100 kg of bhusa (straw)," notes Mr Jasmer Kadian, a 10-acre farmer from Ganjo Garhi in Karnal, Haryana. On top of this, power-threshing takes up 3.5-4 hours an acre, costing another Rs 900-1,000.

But despite this obvious cost and time advantage from harvester combines, the current season has witnessed something unusual. As one travels through Panipat and Karnal to Kurukshetra, Fatehgarh Sahib, Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Amritsar, a single phenomenon uniformly strikes the eye: Manual harvesting is back. "This time, not more than 40 per cent of the wheat has been combine-harvested. And that, I believe, is a significant development," points out Dr B.S. Dhillon, Director (Research) at the Punjab Agricultural University here.

Why have farmers gone back to manual harvesting? The main reason given by them is better straw recovery. "One acre yields me 20 quintals of wheat and an equal quantity of straw. Through manual harvesting, I can recover almost this entire straw, whereas the combine-reaper route would only salvage 10-12 quintals. This is because the combine operates 30-40 cm above the ground and the left-over stalk gives less straw," according to Mr Kadian.

In normal years, straw yields do not matter much. But this time, with straw prices ruling at Rs 400-500 per quintal (against last year's Rs 200-300), farmers have found it worthwhile to invest extra time and money in manual harvesting, instead of combines.