From Basic Fundamentals to Advanced Design ApplicationsA culmination of the author's more than 20 years of research efforts, academic papers, and lecture notes, Combine Harvesters: Theory, Modeling, and Design outlines the key concepts of combine harvester process theory and provides you with a complete and thorough understanding of combine harvest

The complete illustrated story of the combine harvester. Accompanied by a wide variety of new colour photographs, this book will appeal to farm machinery enthusiasts and those interested in the development of modern industrial machinery.

This book discusses the application of the coupled CFD-DEM approach for simulating the separation of grain and material other than grain in combine harvester cleaning devices. Based on a literature study, it describes the most important influencing factors and presents a database for particle parameterization. It investigates the separation process in two steps with differing levels of process abstraction. The first step involves numerical separation in a vertically oscillating box with airflow, and in the context of a sensitivity study, investigates the effect of selected material, contact and operating parameters on the target variables’ separation time and grain purity. In the second step, the numerical separation process was performed in a 200 mm wide segment of a combine harvester cleaning device. The numerical results were then compared with experimental investigations in order to confirm the method’s applicability.

This book contains a classic guide to vintage farming machinery, including detailed descriptions, explanations, and illustrations of the machinery treated. It contains information on the various types of harvesters and other examples of machinery that existed at the time of publication. This is a fascinating work and is thoroughly recommended for anyone interested in farm machinery, especially the history and development thereof. Contents include: “Methods of Harvesting by Combine”, “Main Types of Combine”, “The Threshing Mechanism”, “Handling of the Straw”, “Choice of Crop Varieties”, “Combine Harvester or Binder”, “Combine Harvesters”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new introduction on poultry farming.

The uptake of agricultural mechanization in Ethiopia is low with less than one percent of agricultural plots plowed with a tractor. However, in recent years the uptake of agricultural machinery has accelerated. We note an impressive increase in imports of combine-harvesters and of tractors, seemingly associated with the increasing costs of agricultural labor and animal traction, substitutes for agricultural mechanization. We estimate that a quarter of the area in Ethiopia planted to wheat – the fourth most important cereal in the country – is currently harvested by combine-harvesters, and they are widely used in the major wheat growing zones in the southeast of the country in particular. Private mechanization service providers have rapidly emerged. Smallholders in these wheat growing zones rely heavily on agricultural machinery rental services for plowing, harrowing, or harvesting. We find that mechanization is associated with significantly lower labor use, and that the adoption of combine-harvesters – but not tractors – is significantly associated with higher yields, seemingly due to lower post-harvest losses. While further expansion of mechanization in the country is desired, given the environmental and financial cost of holding oxen and the higher yields linked with some forms of mechanization, it appears to be hampered by farm structures, particularly small farm sizes and consequent limits in scale; fragmented plots; crop diversity; physical constraints, such as presence of stones, steepness of fields, and soil types; and economic and financial constraints, including limited access to foreign exchange and credit and the still relatively low wages in less commercialized zones.