Comment on I watched several videos on a Combine Harvester's inner workings
ladicius@lemmy.world 2 days ago
They continuously improved on every single step in the process. What you see now are the descendants of many generations of harvesters.
Comment on I watched several videos on a Combine Harvester's inner workings
ladicius@lemmy.world 2 days ago
They continuously improved on every single step in the process. What you see now are the descendants of many generations of harvesters.
YellowParenti@lemmy.wtf 2 days ago
This reminded me of a mini documentary on helping subsistence farmers in India. Since the farms were small and irregular, they couldn’t recommend powered harvesters to be shared. They basically squatted down and used sickles. It was a whole family affair as kids as small as 3 were needed to harvest quickly and get it to market.
They introduced scythes with baskets to catch and softly drop the grain or whatever to the side. Image
this isn’t that documentary, but it does show the slow going of using a sickle at first. It then shows how much faster the scythe is.
The documentary also showed how some were reluctant as the kids were free and basically the sickle was how it had always been done. So they had contests of 5 farmers against one guy on the scythe and a kid picking up the wheat and putting it on a cart. I think it was 30 meters long. The scythe had the job finished and helping the kid finish putting the grain in the cart before the other farmers had gotten halfway.
MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Scythes require more specific wind and moisture conditions compared to sickles (as do combines), but they do save a ton of work. My favorite scythe fact is that there is an even faster but more dangerous version called the Flemish Scythe, that is one-handed. So you can actually dual wield them. From “The Scythe Book”:
Fucking hardcore.
YellowParenti@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
Thanks for the link to the book. Im guessing the person had to swing it almost like a one handed golf swing to get momentum. I can see how being off by a little leads to serious injuries.