Impact of Modern Rice Harvesting Practices over Traditional Ones

Mechanized agriculture plays a key role in the overall socio-economic development in terms of food security, value addition, employment, poverty alleviation and export earnings. Due to the migration of agricultural labor in non-farm sectors and increasing climate vulnerability, it is a great challenge to keep pace of food production for the exponential growth of population, especially in the developing countries. Hence, the main aim of this study was to examine the present status and impact of modern rice harvesting practices over traditional manual harvesting. In order to investigate the interactions between modern rice harvesting technologies and benefits of use, we reviewed overall scenarios of rice harvesting in the world along with identified problems due to present practices and the benefit of using modern technologies including precision agriculture. The major findings of this study were as follows: agriculture in most of the developing countries were characterized by low productivity due to less practice of modern technologies, less management of modern technologies, inadequate control of repeated crop losses due to natural calamities. Identified problems in traditional manual rice harvesting were: labor crisis at peak harvesting period, high harvesting cost as the traditional method was labor intensive and high labor wages, delayed harvesting due to the unavailability of labors, more grain/yield losses owing to the over maturity. Furthermore, identified benefits in modern rice harvesting practices were to save harvesting time, cost and labor involvement with reducing grain/yield loss and human drudgery. The further benefits were enhancing the income through custom hire services and creating a new employment opportunity in technology operation and maintenance. The results indicated that adoption of appropriate rice harvesting technology in the developing countries is urgently needed to increase the cropping intensity, crop productivity and economic emancipation through less inputs of time, labor and cost.