Custom harvesting

Last updated March 22, 2019

In agriculture, custom harvesting or custom combining is the business of harvesting of crops for others. Custom harvesters usually own their own combines and work for the same farms every harvest season. Custom harvesting relieves farmers from having to invest capital in expensive equipment while at the same time maximizing the machinery's use.^[1]

Agriculture is the science and art of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. The history of agriculture began thousands of years ago. After gathering wild grains beginning at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers began to plant them around 11,500 years ago. Pigs, sheep and cattle were domesticated over 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. Industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture in the twentieth century came to dominate agricultural output, though about 2 billion people still depended on subsistence agriculture into the twenty-first century.

Harvesting is the process of gathering a ripe crop from the fields. Reaping is the cutting of grain or pulse for harvest, typically using a scythe, sickle, or reaper. On smaller farms with minimal mechanization, harvesting is the most labor-intensive activity of the growing season. On large mechanized farms, harvesting utilizes the most expensive and sophisticated farm machinery, such as the combine harvester. Process automation has increased the efficiency of both the seeding and harvesting process. Specialized harvesting equipment utilizing conveyor belts to mimic gentle gripping and mass transport replaces the manual task of removing each seedling by hand. The term "harvesting" in general usage may include immediate postharvest handling, including cleaning, sorting, packing, and cooling.

A crop is a plant or animal product that can be grown and harvested extensively for profit or subsistence. Crop may refer either to the harvested parts or to the harvest in a more refined state. Most crops are cultivated in agriculture or aquaculture. A crop is usually expanded to include macroscopic fungus, or alga (algaculture).

The custom harvesting industry has its roots in the mid-twentieth century. Before the invention of the combine harvester, farmers usually owned their own harvesting machinery and worked in tandem with migrant workers, who would bring their own threshing equipment. As combines became more and more widespread, the demand for migrant labor decreased. Custom harvesters, owning their own combines, existed beginning in the 1920s, albeit on a small scale.^[2] However, World War II caused a labor and materials shortage, and the custom harvesting industry experienced a great growth. In North America, the area from Texas to Saskatchewan was heavily traversed by custom harvesters. In 1942, there were approximately 500 such operators in this range, but by 1947 that number had grown to 8,000 in Kansas alone. Over the years, the industry transformed from one being run solely by men into family-run businesses. Harvesters would pass their routes and clients down to their children, thus turning custom combining into family tradition.^[1]

A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer might own the farmed land or might work as a laborer on land owned by others, but in advanced economies, a farmer is usually a farm owner, while employees of the farm are known as farm workers, or farmhands. However, in the not so distant past, a farmer was a person who promotes or improves the growth of by labor and attention, land or crops or raises animals.

Migrant worker person who migrates within their home country or outside it to pursue work

A "migrant worker" is a person who either migrates within their home country or outside it to pursue work such as seasonal work. Migrant workers usually do not have an intention to stay permanently in the country or region in which they work.

Threshing is the process of loosening the edible part of grain from the husks and straw to which it is attached. It is the step in grain preparation after reaping and before winnowing, which separates the grain from the chaff. Threshing does not remove the bran from the grain.

Custom combiners charge for their services in several ways: a flat per-unit of land price, a per-bale price, or a percentage of the crop. One of the biggest problems for farmers who hire custom harvesters is the availability of labor and the timing of the harvest. If the harvester cannot be available right when the crops are ready, there is the risk of low harvest (if too early) or spoilage (if too late).^[3]

The number of custom harvesters has dropped in modern times due to a number of reasons. For one, the consolidation of farms into large-scale operations has allowed them to operate on economies of scale such that they do not need to rely on contractors. Competition is another reason. In China, custom harvesting became such a popular profession in the late 20th century that too many people entered the industry and prices became too low to generate a profit.^[4]

In economics, competition is a condition where different economic firms seek to obtain a share of a limited good by varying the elements of the marketing mix: price, product, promotion and place. In classical economic thought, competition causes commercial firms to develop new products, services and technologies, which would give consumers greater selection and better products. The greater selection typically causes lower prices for the products, compared to what the price would be if there was no competition (monopoly) or little competition (oligopoly).

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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to agriculture:

Combine harvester machine that harvests grain crops

Combineharvesters are now popular for harvesting of all type crops. Few companies makes combine harvesters with different headers for different crops. Now a days labour cost in India for harvesting got increased as agricultural labour have sortage in India.

Sharecropping is a form of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on their portion of land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range of different situations and types of agreements that have used a form of the system. Some are governed by tradition, and others by law. Legal contract systems such as the Italian mezzadria, the French métayage, the Spanish mediero, the Slavic połowcy,издoльщина or the Islamic system of muqasat, occur widely.

The International Harvester Company was a United States manufacturer of agricultural machinery, construction equipment, trucks, automobiles, and household and commercial products. Its reorganized successor, after spin-off of several of those businesses, is Navistar International.

Agriculture in the Soviet Union was mostly collectivized, with some limited cultivation of private plots. It is often viewed as one of the more inefficient sectors of the economy of the Soviet Union. A number of food taxes were introduced in the early Soviet period despite the Decree on Land that immediately followed the October Revolution. The forced collectivization and class war against "kulaks" under Stalinism greatly disrupted farm output in the 1920s and 1930s, contributing to the Soviet famine of 1932–33. A system of state and collective farms, known as sovkhozes and kolkhozes respectively, placed the rural population in a system intended to be unprecedentedly productive and fair but which turned out to be chronically inefficient and lacking in fairness. Under the administrations of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev, a large number of reforms were enacted as attempts to defray the inefficiencies of the Stalinist agricultural system. However, Marxist–Leninist ideology did not allow for any substantial amount of market mechanism to coexist alongside central planning, so the private plot fraction of Soviet agriculture, which was its most productive, remained confined to a limited role. Throughout its later decades the Soviet Union never stopped using substantial portions of the precious metals mined each year in Siberia to pay for grain imports, which has been taken by various authors as an economic indicator showing that the country's agriculture was never as successful as it ought to have been. The real numbers, however, were treated as state secrets at the time, so accurate analysis of the sector's performance was limited outside the USSR and nearly impossible to assemble within its borders. However, Soviet citizens as consumers were familiar with the fact that foods, especially meats, were often noticeably scarce, to the point that not lack of money so much as lack of things to buy with it was the limiting factor in their standard of living.

A market garden is the relatively small-scale production of fruits, vegetables and flowers as cash crops, frequently sold directly to consumers and restaurants. The diversity of crops grown on a small area of land, typically, from under one acre to a few acres, or sometimes in greenhouses distinguishes it from other types of farming. Such a farm on a larger scale is sometimes called a truck farm.

A swather, or windrower, is a farm implement that cuts hay or small grain crops and forms them into a windrow. "Swather" is predominantly the North American term for these machines. In Australia and other parts of the world, they are called "windrowers". They aid harvesting by speeding up the process of drying the crop down to a moisture content suitable for harvesting and storage.

The history of agriculture in the United States covers the period from the first English settlers to the present day. In Colonial America, agriculture was the primary livelihood for 90% of the population, and most towns were shipping points for the export of agricultural products. Most farms were geared toward subsistence production for family use. The rapid growth of population and the expansion of the frontier opened up large numbers of new farms, and clearing the land was a major preoccupation of farmers. After 1800, cotton became the chief crop in southern plantations, and the chief American export. After 1840, industrialization and urbanization opened up lucrative domestic markets. The number of farms grew from 1.4 million in 1850, to 4.0 million in 1880, and 6.4 million in 1910; then started to fall, dropping to 5.6 million in 1950 and 2.2 million in 2008.

Allis-Chalmers was a U.S. manufacturer of machinery for various industries. Its business lines included agricultural equipment, construction equipment, power generation and power transmission equipment, and machinery for use in industrial settings such as factories, flour mills, sawmills, textile mills, steel mills, refineries, mines, and ore mills. The first Allis-Chalmers Company was formed in 1901 as an amalgamation of the Edward P. Allis Company, Fraser & Chalmers, the Gates Iron Works, and the industrial business line of the Dickson Manufacturing Company. It was reorganized in 1912 as the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company. During the next 70 years its industrial machinery filled countless mills, mines, and factories around the world, and its brand gained fame among consumers mostly from its farm equipment business's orange tractors and silver combine harvesters. In the 1980s and 1990s a series of divestitures transformed the firm and eventually dissolved it. Its successors today are Allis-Chalmers Energy and AGCO.

Mechanised agriculture is the process of using agricultural machinery to mechanise the work of agriculture, greatly increasing farm worker productivity. In modern times, powered machinery has replaced many farm jobs formerly carried out by manual labour or by working animals such as oxen, horses and mules.

Bonanza farms were very large farms established in the western United States during the late nineteenth century. They conducted large-scale operations, mostly cultivating and harvesting wheat. Bonanza farms developed as a result of a number of factors, including the efficient new farming machinery of the 1870s, cheap abundant land available during that period, the growth of eastern markets in the U.S., and completion of most major railroads between the farming areas and markets.

New Holland is a global brand of agricultural machinery produced by CNH Industrial. New Holland agricultural products include tractors, combine harvesters, balers, forage harvesters, self-propelled sprayers, haying tools, seeding equipment, hobby tractors, utility vehicles and implements, and grape harvesters.

The Rough and Tumble Engineers Historical Association puts on the second- or third-oldest Threshermen’s Reunion in the United States. It is held in the middle of August each year, from Wednesday through Saturday, in Kinzers, Pennsylvania, about eight miles east of the city of Lancaster. The association’s name is taken from the 1890s book Rough and Tumble Engineering: Book of Instructions for Operators of Farm and Traction Engines by James H. Maggard.

Intensive crop farming is a modern form of intensive farming that refers to the industrialized production of crops. Intensive crop farming's methods include innovation in agricultural machinery, farming methods, genetic engineering technology, techniques for achieving economies of scale in production, the creation of new markets for consumption, patent protection of genetic information, and global trade. These methods are widespread in developed nations.

Agriculture in Angola has a tremendous potential. Angola is a potentially rich agricultural country, with fertile soils, a favourable climate, and about 57.4 million ha of agricultural land, including more than 5.0 million ha of arable land. Before independence from Portugal in 1975, Angola had a flourishing tradition of family-based farming and was self-sufficient in all major food crops except wheat. The country exported coffee and maize, as well as crops such as sisal, bananas, tobacco and cassava. By the 1990s Angola produced less than 1 percent the volume of coffee it had produced in the early 1970s, while production of cotton, tobacco and sugar cane had ceased almost entirely. Poor global market prices and lack of investment have severely limited the sector since independence.

The cultivation of tobacco usually takes place annually. The tobacco is germinated in cold frames or hotbeds and then transplanted to the field until it matures. It is grown in warm climates with rich, well-drained soil. About 4.2 million hectares of tobacco were under cultivation worldwide in 2000, yielding over seven million tonnes of tobacco.

The Gleaner Manufacturing Company is an American manufacturer of combine harvesters. Gleaner has been a popular brand of combine harvester particularly in the Midwestern United States for many decades, first as an independent firm, and later as a division of Allis-Chalmers. The Gleaner brand continues today under the ownership of AGCO.

Agricultural machinery machinery used for growing food

Agricultural machinery is machinery used in farming or other agriculture. There are many types of such equipment, from hand tools and power tools to tractors and the countless kinds of farm implements that they tow or operate. Diverse arrays of equipment are used in both organic and nonorganic farming. Especially since the advent of mechanised agriculture, agricultural machinery is an indispensable part of how the world is fed.

References

1 2 Wishart, David J. (editor) (2004). Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 41–42. ISBN 0-8032-4787-7.
↑ Clarke, Sally H. (2002). Regulation and the Revolution in United States Farm Productivity. Cambridge University Press. p. 175. ISBN 0-521-52845-3.
↑ Reed, Barbara; Forero, Larry (2007). Irrigated Pasture Production in the Central Valley of California. ANR Publications. p. 45. ISBN 1-60107-423-9.
↑ Wallach, Bret (2005). "Livelihoods Today". Understanding the Cultural Landscape. Guilford Press. p. 130. ISBN 1-59385-119-7.

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[egp-1] 1 2 Wishart, David J. (editor) (2004). Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 41–42. ISBN 0-8032-4787-7.

[2] Clarke, Sally H. (2002). Regulation and the Revolution in United States Farm Productivity. Cambridge University Press. p. 175. ISBN 0-521-52845-3.

[3] Reed, Barbara; Forero, Larry (2007). Irrigated Pasture Production in the Central Valley of California. ANR Publications. p. 45. ISBN 1-60107-423-9.

[4] Wallach, Bret (2005). "Livelihoods Today". Understanding the Cultural Landscape. Guilford Press. p. 130. ISBN 1-59385-119-7.

Custom harvesting

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