On-Farm Evaluation and Verification of Engine Driven Harvester

In Ethiopia harvesting of cereal crops is one of the major attentive agricultural operations in agriculture production, which demands considerable amount of Labours. The availability and cost of labour during wheat crop harvesting season are serious problems. It is therefore, essential to adopt appropriate harvesting machinery is urgently needed to reduce labor and production costs so that the timeliness in harvesting operation could be ensured and field losses are minimized to increase production on the farm. In this study, performance of walking behind reaper used for wheat harvesting was assessed and compared with manual harvesting using sickle. The objective of this study was to evaluate the field performance of walking behind reaper at farmer’s field. The results showed that the actual field capacity of the reaper was found as 0.072 ha/h with a field efficiency of 66.90% per cent at an average operating speed of 2.15 km/h. The fuel consumption was observed as 1.09 l/h. The harvesting cost of reaper was 46.93% less as compared with manual harvesting. The overall performance of power reaper for wheat harvesting was found satisfactory.