A New Way To Harvest Soybeans

A New Way To Harvest Soybeans COMBINES Miscellaneous 30-3-40 A totally new way to harvest soybeans is on its way to American farms. A prototype has been built and its inventors say it'll be less expensive and gentler on beans, resulting in a higher quality harvest. The patented unit should be on the market within five years. The dramatically different harvester, which is much smaller because it only harvests the beans, not the whole plant, has been developed over several decades by two ag engineers û one Brazilian and one American. Milford Hanna of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has been working with Cezar Mesquita of Brazil on the radical new design. With the help of a Brazilian investor and other researchers, they developed and built a prototype that has outperformed conventional combines in Brazilian field trials. It has been used for the past four years. "In Cezar's research, he found that threshing the entire plant requires 10 times more energy than collecting just the pods," Hanna explains. "The prototype is a four-row self-propelled unit, run by a 75-hp motor that was salvaged from an old car. It would likely only require about 40 to 50 horsepower, however." There's no cutting bar or concave cylinders. Instead, it has two horizontal, counter-rotating shafts lined with many plastic three-fingered discs. The fingers rotate at up to 2,000 rpm and, when they hit the pods, they pop open, emptying the beans into the combine where centrifugal force throws them up and into an impact-resistant plastic pvc pipe. From there, they are carried to a separator where any chaff is removed by a fan-produced air stream. Most of the chaff has already been dispersed out the top of the head, however. Because the unit takes advantage of the soybean pod's natural tendency to open up or shatter, the plant stalks are left standing, stripped of most leaves and pods. "There is almost no damage to the beans with this combine," Hanna says. "There was less than one percent broken beans in our field trials, whereas conventional combines typically have broken rates closer to eight or nine percent." Hanna believes the machine will be an ideal size for small and medium-size soybean growers, and university and company test plots. It could also be easily modified to work with other crops, such as edible beans or rice, he says. Hanna and Mesquita are currently seeking a manufacturer and believe the unit lends itself to either self-propelled, pull-type or tractor-mounted designs. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Milford Hanna, Biological Systems Engineer, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Industrial Agricultural Products Center, 211 L.W. Chase Hall, Lincoln, Neb. 68583 (ph 402 472-1634; fax 402 472-6338; mhanna1@unl.edu).

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