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Potato harvesters are machines that harvest potatoes. They work by lifting the potatoes from the bed using a share. Soil and crop are transferred onto a series of webs where the loose soil is sieved out. The potatoes are moved towards the back of the harvester on to a separation unit and then (on human-operated machines) to a picking table where people pick out the stones, clods, and haulms (stems or stalks) by hand. The potatoes then go on to a side elevator and into a trailer or a potato box.
A potato spinner is connected to a tractor through the three-point linkage. Older machines were drawn by horse and were driven by a ground drive. It works by a flat piece of metal which runs horizontal to the ground lifting the potatoes up and a large wheel with spokes on it called a reel pushing the clay and potatoes out to the side. The potatoes are then gathered by hand, placed into containers and transported from the field for further packaging.[ citation needed ]
The potato spinner is becoming obsolete because modern potato harvesting equipment eliminates manual gathering of potatoes and leaves fewer potatoes in the soil.[ citation needed ]
A haulm topper is an agricultural machine that cuts potato stems (haulms) before potatoes are harvested. It is like a flail mower but has the profile of the potato drills. Modern potato farmers often mount a haulm topper on the front of the tractor and have a trailed potato harvester towed behind the tractor. Toppers can also be rear-mounted. It is a very efficient machine.
Media related to Potato harvesters at Wikimedia Commons
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A plough or plow is a farm tool for loosening or turning the soil before sowing seed or planting. Ploughs were traditionally drawn by oxen and horses but in modern farms are drawn by tractors. A plough may have a wooden, iron or steel frame with a blade attached to cut and loosen the soil. It has been fundamental to farming for most of history. The earliest ploughs had no wheels; such a plough was known to the Romans as an aratrum. Celtic peoples first came to use wheeled ploughs in the Roman era.
A scythe is an agricultural hand tool for mowing grass or harvesting crops. It is historically used to cut down or reap edible grains, before the process of threshing. The scythe has been largely replaced by horse-drawn and then tractor machinery, but is still used in some areas of Europe and Asia. Reapers are bladed machines that automate the cutting of the scythe, and sometimes subsequent steps in preparing the grain or the straw or hay.
The modern combine harvester, also called a combine, is a machine designed to harvest a variety of cultivated seeds. Combine harvesters are one of the most economically important labour-saving inventions, significantly reducing the fraction of the population engaged in agriculture. Among the crops harvested with a combine are wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, corn (maize), sorghum, millet, soybeans, flax (linseed), sunflowers and rapeseed. The separated straw is then either chopped onto the field and ploughed back in, or laid out in rows, ready to be baled and used for bedding and cattle feed.
The hazelnut is the fruit of the hazel tree and therefore includes any of the nuts deriving from species of the genus Corylus, especially the nuts of the species Corylus avellana. They are also known as cobnuts or filberts according to species.
A reaper is a farm implement or person that reaps crops at harvest when they are ripe. Usually the crop involved is a cereal grass. The first documented reaping machines were Gallic reapers that were used in Roman times in what would become modern-day France. The Gallic reaper involved a comb which collected the heads, with an operator knocking the grain into a box for later threshing.
A loader is a heavy equipment machine used in construction to move or load materials such as soil, rock, sand, demolition debris, etc. into or onto another type of machinery.
A mower is a person or machine that cuts (mows) grass or other plants that grow on the ground. Usually mowing is distinguished from reaping, which uses similar implements, but is the traditional term for harvesting grain crops, e.g. with reapers and combines.
A baler or hay baler is a piece of farm machinery used to compress a cut and raked crop into compact bales that are easy to handle, transport, and store. Often, bales are configured to dry and preserve some intrinsic value of the plants bundled. Different types of balers are commonly used, each producing a different type of bale – rectangular or cylindrical, of various sizes, bound with twine, strapping, netting, or wire.
A skidder is any type of heavy vehicle used in a logging operation for pulling cut trees out of a forest in a process called "skidding", in which the logs are transported from the cutting site to a landing. There they are loaded onto trucks, and sent to the mill. One exception is that in the early days of logging, when distances from the timberline to the mill were shorter, the landing stage was omitted altogether, and the "skidder" would have been used as the main road vehicle, in place of the trucks, railroad, or flume. Modern forms of skidders can pull trees with a cable and winch, just like the old steam donkeys, or with a hydraulic grapple either on boom or on the back of the frame (clambunk skidder).
Cut-to-length logging (CTL) is a mechanized harvesting system in which trees are delimbed and cut to length directly at the stump. CTL is typically a two-man, two-machine operation with a harvester felling, delimbing, and bucking trees and a forwarder transporting the logs from the felling to a landing area close to a road accessible by trucks.
Mechanised agriculture or agricultural mechanization is the use of machinery and equipment, ranging from simple and basic hand tools to more sophisticated, motorized equipment and machinery, to perform agricultural operations. In modern times, powered machinery has replaced many farm task formerly carried out by manual labour or by working animals such as oxen, horses and mules.
A Carrot Harvester is an agricultural machine for harvesting carrots. Carrot harvesters are either top lifters or share lifters and may be tractor mounted, trailed behind a tractor or self-propelled. The machine typically harvests between one and six rows of carrots at once.
Sugarcane or sugar cane is a species of tall, perennial grass that is used for sugar production. The plants are 2–6 m (6–20 ft) tall with stout, jointed, fibrous stalks that are rich in sucrose, which accumulates in the stalk internodes. Sugarcanes belong to the grass family, Poaceae, an economically important flowering plant family that includes maize, wheat, rice, and sorghum, and many forage crops. It is native to the warm temperate and tropical regions of India, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea.
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 relates to the mechanical structures and devices 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. Agricultural machinery can be regarded as part of wider agricultural automation technologies, which includes the more advanced digital equipment and robotics. While agricultural robots have the potential to automate the three key steps involved in any agricultural operation, conventional motorized machinery is used principally to automate only the performing step where diagnosis and decision-making are conducted by humans based on observations and experience.
A tree spade is a specialized machine that mechanizes the transplanting of large plants whose hand-powered transplanting would be prohibitively laborious. These include large bushes and small or medium trees. By bringing mechanized power to what was formerly only a manual process, tree spades do for transplanting what tractors and combine harvesters do for agriculture, and what excavators and other heavy equipment do for construction. Today, tree spades are widely used in the tree nursery industry to increase production rates, and in the landscaping industry for tree removal and transplanting.
An electric tug is a battery-powered and pedestrian-operated machine used to move heavy loads on wheels.
A Sugarbeet harvester is an agricultural machine for harvesting sugar beet. It was invented by German farmer and agricultural engineer Otto Wilke in 1927. From 1936, series production then started first at Krupp, then later at Lanz. From 1945 the Stoll Company took over beet harvester production after purchasing the patent rights. The first machines were pulled by a tractor and only one row could be lifted. Modern self-propelled sugarbeet harvesters have predominantly 6-row harvesting units. The beets are lifted from the ground by lifting shares. Through cleaning rollers, the transfer web and the discharge elevator, the beets are separated from the adhering soil and transported into the holding tank of the machine. The beets are placed on the edge of the field in storage clamps or overloaded on a transport vehicle during harvesting. The leaves of the beets are removed. They remain for fertilization in the field or can be used as animal food for cattle, the leaves can be fed fresh or as silage.
The tattie holidays are a school holiday in Scotland typically falling around October. The holiday started in the 1930s, when children would be taken out of school to help with the local potato harvest, with other children just not turning up for class. The tradition continued into the 1980s, when the advent of new farm machinery such as potato harvesters made hand picking potatoes obsolete. The word "tattie" comes from the Scots word for potato.
