Evaluation of a rice reaper used for rapeseed harvesting.

3 Abstract: Introduction of appropriate machinery is one of the major factors for reducing labour requirements and production costs of second crop cultivation after rice especially rapeseed. In this study, performance of power tiller-mounted rice reaper used for rapeseed harvesting was assessed and compared with manual harvesting using sickle. The results showed that the effective field capacity of the reaper was 0.170 ha/h compared to 0.008 ha/h for manual harvesting. Labour requirements for reaper and manual harvesting were 5.88 and 128 man-h/ha, respectively. The grain losses for manual and reaper harvesting were 7.33% and 6.83%, respectively. There were no significant differences between means of losses in the two methods. The cost of harvesting operation (without threshing and handling costs) was 88.88$/ha for manual harvesting and 15.20$/ha for reaper harvesting (mechanical harvesting). The break-even point of the machine is 4.83ha/year; therefore if the machine (power tiller and reaper combined) works less than this amount it is not economical and renting machine should be considered.