So today we'll be talking about the post-harvest losses related to grain harvesting and we'll talk about some of the methods of harvesting, various different types of equipment. And in general what are some of the losses in terms of post-harvest losses that occur from the grain harvesting. So harvesting, and threshing and cleaning these come as in come under the harvesting processes of the post-harvest losses. We only talk about [COUGH] post-harvest losses. There are a few things that we also need to look at. One is the losses during the pre-harvest processes when you delay your harvesting processes, you may get some lodging losses. That means when the plants and the mature grains that fall down on the ground, and it's very difficult to harvest them or cut them or collect them. The other one would be shattering losses. Shattering losses would be the mature grains from the plants that shed on the ground and is caused by various different factors, wind, rain, and the rats, the handling, and all different kinds of things. The moisture content is such a critical factor to reduce the food service losses and to maintain the quality of the grain. For example, if you harvest paddy, make sure that your moisture content ranges between 22 to 28%. And we also gave you the physical characteristics of the maturity. How do you know that maturity happens? So for example here, you'll see that the panicles bend with their own weight, and then they become kind of yellowed hulls and the grains become very full. And if you go through the list you'll see that corn or maize when harvested you need to have that at 23 to 28% moisture content out there. Sorghum, on the other hand 20 to 25%. Beans, you know you need to harvest a little be higher moisture content about 30 to 40% moisture content. Otherwise you know you might get lots of quality, lots of sharing or some other biggest and out there. How do people harvest various different type of crops and you know in harvesting. [COUGH] The operations within the harvesting we can define as cutting, threshing and cleaning all these three components are as in the harvesting process out there. It's a really labor intensive process. It can be done either manually, or it can be done with mechanical devices or large equipment, depending on your economy, depending on your farm size, and depending on affordability. That's how people do that. Manual cutting is the very most common cutting tool sickle crop in developing countries. And the advantage is it's very cheap and people can afford to do that. You can do that at any time. The other advantage is as I mentioned before the lodging losses and the crops are falling down, if you do that with your sickle you can pick them up and then cut so you minimize those losses out there. Traditionally the labor availability wasn't a limitation, although now it is. The level of availability is becoming very limited out there. So you can do manual cutting or you can have power-operated. Again, on the power-operated, there could be smaller machines that, for small holder farmers they can use it or there could be large machine like combine harvest was that we see there, here in the US. The power operated cutters they come in different sizes and shapes. In developing countries especially in rice harvesting or corn harvesting, reapers could be hand driven or they could be mounted on a tractor. Both ways can done. The capacity is much better than manual, of course, is 2-4 hectare per day. You can do that. And commonly used cutting mechanism for cereals, these reapers are. There are many different types of reapers common there and we have listed some of this. In a rotary type cutter heads and with serrated edge or some other thing, the labor requirement is a lot less than manual cutting. And the advantage with that one is unlike with sickle you can pick all the lost crops. Here you cannot do that because the cutter, the heads do not pick up those bend down crops. So the crops that lying on the ground. There are thousands of different type of those sickle. If you go to India or Africa, you see that. It varies from state to state, region to region and from people to people. That way, most people look at the durability and the cost. So, farmers, that's how they buy those many different types of mineral manual cutting pieces. Threshing, which is basically you separate your grain kernels from the plant. So basically, when you do threshing, this process requires one other combination of striking, squeezing, tearing or rubbing actions. And because of that one the seeds or grains they get separated from the rest of the plant that's why it needed for threshing. Threshing process is very critical as the delay in threshing can cause a lot of grains spoilage and the increase in breakage and also subsequent other downstream processes can be hampered. So threshing is a very critical part of in a post-harvest processes. And by doing your threshing the right equipment, the right time, you can save a lot of grains from being lost out there. There are many different type of threshing methods in developing countries. As you can see that the trampling basically you have your crops after harvested put it on the ground and then you run your animals in a line or in either the cows or buffaloes are depending on what's available. So, with the pressure and the squeezing with their feet out there that's how you get the shearing action between the grains and the plains. Or what they do many times, they shatter them. They throw the plants onto some drums or some hard surface, and again because of that impact, the grains are separated from out there. The very common practice in Bangladesh where we see that very often now there are some mechanical things happening with pedal threshold. The farmers can afford to do that. Very simply mechanical device. They run a threshold with their pedal, with their feet and then their hand. So they basically in using their feet and using their hand to feed that the harvest of crops and then the ground is rotated by the pedal action of their feet. And that's how they can do that. Or they can also have large scale threshers, as you can see in the picture, the machine threshers. It's run by either the diesel engine or our tractor shaft or things like that. One of the pictures that we have shown here in this very simple way these power operated stationary threshers work. From left side the crop is fed into the machine, there is a blower, there is a drum that rotates and causes all the shearing action. Then on the right side you see that all the straws and other things will get out or fly away. From the bottom there are fewer exits down there. So the grain that is separated can be sorted out there or if you don't even sort it the grains can come there. So you basically, feed your crops from the left side and your grains come at the bottom of that. One of the things that people don't realize how important it's to clean after you've harvested, do the threshing of the crop. That means when you do the threshing, not only the plant's seeds are cutting but also the plant itself get cut, might be. And other associated products that you don't need with your grain. So, it's a very common practice, it's a very important process to clean your grain before you do anything further. Whether you do parboiling or storage or drying or anything else, you do that. So, basically that's what it is, the removal of unwanted materials. The reason is if you have your clean grain, it has a higher economic value. And the people will look at that when they get to the market. Cleaning process improve the drying, storability and milling quality of the grain by avoiding the mold growth. Or milling of unwanted foreign materials out there. The combine harvesters are not very common, it means lot of capital investment out there. People can do that by cooperative farmer organizations they can buy combine harvester. But, I think some rich farmer or large farms can afford to have combine harvester. So, you can see that here in the US all the corn and soybeans are harvested by combine harvester, right? And that's why many times you see when farmers come from other countries, I sometime get people from Africa or India. I always take them to one of our very good farmer friends right here in Champagne County. So, we take them to his field out there. The combine harvesters, the name comes because it combines all the harvesting, threshing, cleaning and everything else out there. It's a self propelled or could be a trailed type. It's a high throughput, it varies between 2-15 hour per hectare. Really fast and of course it's expensive. And like I said, it's suitable for large size field. Losses during harvesting again, now let's talk about that. If we summarize all the processes where the losses happen. One could be the standing crop loss, or losses during threshing and cleaning, the scatter loss, threshing loss, separation losses. All these things combined, or we can combine them into something we call it post service loss during the harvesting process. People have tried to measure that, now that's the most difficult thing. How do we measure the losses? There are no standard measuring protocol yet. Although many different scientists are trying to come up with their own techniques to measure those losses out there. The International Rice Research Institute, they have given us some figure. According to their work, the losses during harvesting of rice could vary between 1% to 5%. And that depends at what moisture content did they do harvest rices and all this kind of thing. Our idiom studied, we have supported some research projects to do in Brazil. We wanted to measure actually in a soybean loss and corn losses from the harvested fields out there. So, this slide explains the various different way I mean the way we try to measure that. You basically for the soybean harvesting there is a plot it's a small plot about two square meter plot. And then the header width of the machine itself is also two meter. So, you basically go ahead first you measure your unharvested soybean are your pre-harvest losses. You harvest it and then you measure your losses that define within the two square meter area. And then you combine all of that and then you subtract the pre-harvest loss, you get loss from the combined out there. The data that we have it out there. You can see the combined losses for the soybean harvesting on the last column that we have. These are the vary if you look at from top to bottom, these are for various different treatments out there. The thing that I think interests you to look at the maximum losses from one operation was over 5.5%. And the minimum losses was about 1.2%. Now you may ask why the maximum and why does that happen? It's a huge variation. It depends on the speed and type of machines that you uses. Basically moisture content of the crop at that time. So, those various different factors make a difference in losses. Then we are also looked at our ADE student funded this project in Brazil again on 02, look at the corn losses during the corn harvesting. Very similar method, although we look at the pre-harvest losses at a 30 square meter area out there. And if you look at the data, the corn losses were not as high as soybean losses, the maximum loss was about 3.64%. And the minimum was about 0.33% among various different type of treatment out there. Now you may ask all is it now? Can we say that throughout the world the losses are that much? No, it also depends on, why you do that? And in what type of crop? What type of landscape you're driving your machine combine harvester in all? Many different factors affect these losses out there. So, if we have to published this data we have to do more data collection. And in a little bit more experiments to tell the world about this. We also very recently, we also collaborative in the project in China and our CRE. It's an organization out there, we jointly funded this project to look at. We surveyed about 900 wheat farmers in Henan Province. And we basically measured the losses, post harvest losses in harvesting, drying, storage, processing and transportation. Usually that's not the highest loss during the harvesting. But what these people, they found that from their measurement and their survey the harvesting losses were very high as more than 1.6%. Now they also looked at the losses where under different type of speed are the type of combines. Saving up their harvesting all the arrangement of the time and then high performance combine out there. So, if you look at the picture you have this graph A, B, C, D, E. A is the regular machine setting, like most people do it. B was reducing the speed. C was the best harvesting time. D was a different wheat variety. And E was the high performance combine. So, it naturally shows that if you harvest your crop at the right time. The best harvesting time is significantly reduced the harvesting losses of that. We are going to expand this once more and look at many other unanswered questions that we have out there. And in future we will be collaborating with them more and investigating these losses more out there. Another study from China shows some similar results about harvesting losses from rice over three seasons in 1987-88 and 89. And average losses from these three year From harvest, it depends whether they do it the manual, the sickle is the cutting thing about 0.43%, and combine about 3.38%. Threshing by pedal thresher, you lose about 0.8%. But if you do motor thresher, about 1.52%. Sometime it is very difficult to comprehend that. Because you always think that if you do by machine, maybe your efficiency will be higher. But in places like India, China, and Africa, where is never availability, and people, those who do that, they are very sincere about not losing any crop. They are not like machine, they see things and they try to pick it up. Or it's just the way they do their things out there. So you can see there how they do the manual, although it's very level intensive. But I think the losses are lot smaller. So how do we prevent these losses? And one thing we said before, proper harvesting time, that's one of the best things, right, harvesting time. So timely harvesting ensures grain quality. Do not harvest too early, because that will result in immature crops. And then you reduce your quality. Your storage and drying, you'll have other issues in that. If you harvest too late, that will also be problematic. Because what can happen, you might have excessive shattering losses because your crops are way too dry. There might be more breakage can happen when your crops are way too dry out there. So this figure show here that in effect of harvest delay. If you delay in year one, two, three and the three year average, you can see that. If you delay it by two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, and no delay, as you can see that you increase your harvesting losses out here. In terms of quality losses also, but this and other data that I'm showing you here, harvested grains should be threshed quickly. Not only harvesting, during the threshing time, threshing should be done as soon as possible, right after harvesting. Otherwise, if you leave your harvested crop on the field, the rain, it can get real wet. And you will lose the quality and then there will be breakage. Overall losses during harvesting from over-dry crop can be as high as 14%, if you don't do these practices right on time. Rain and wind can increase the losses even up to 22%. This data shows basically in three factors, that there is a research done by International Rice Research Institute. The cracked kernels, yellow kernels, and damaged kernels, these are all some of the parameters they measured. And these are all the indication of quality losses. So what it shows that in each set these, there are two graphs. The first one says if it delayed by two days, so second day you'll have more cracked, about 20% increase in the cracking. If you delay it by three days, you will have about 50% increase in cracking of your thing. And same way for yellow and damaged kernels. So basically what we can see from this graph, that do not delay. Do the threshing right on time. Prevention of these losses that we talked about by various different processes, during cutting, during cleaning, during thrashing. And all these things are very important out there. And most of the world is moving into mechanized harvesting now and all out there. So I put some of the things here for you to look at. If you do a machine harvesting, make sure that you operate your machine at the right set of parameters. Operating the header at too high may result in higher grain loss. Operating the machine too fast or too slow would also cause a lot more increase in your harvest losses. With proper machine operation and adjustment, I think you can significantly reduce your harvesting losses. Same way for threshing, you need to have optimum threshing speed. And the speed will depend on basically your grain moisture content and the volume of materials that you are putting into the thresher. Too high speed of threshing will also result in high damage. And too low a speed of this threshing machine can also increase your non-threshed materials out there, so you're going to lose some of your crops out there. So that's the measures that we want to do, basically harvest with the right equipment and harvest at the right time. And then do the threshing at the right time without much delay after harvesting. I think this all summarizes about what are the various different avenues that loses can happen during harvesting processes. And then we also talked about what are some of the things that we can do, whether we do manual harvesting or machine harvesting. And of that, what are some of the things that we do reduce these post harvest losses out there? [SOUND]
