Abstract
<p>Rice combine harvesting is popular among farmers due to a labor shortage and high wage labor. This condition impacts on the rapid expansion of business of rice combine harvester service. The objective of this research was to evaluate the service characteristics of rice combine harvester for farmer and factor affecting the use of combine harvester. Primary data was collected purposively 85 operators and randomly 729 farmers with statistic analysis. Results of the study indicated that the harvesting cost of 798.48 THB/rai for using a combine harvester in wet season is smaller than the cost of manual harvesting of 1,542.17 THB/rai. The important factors affecting the use of combine harvest were farmers’ education, farm size and family size. Net return from this service business is over 250 THB/rai or over 35 % of total profit that it is economic benefit for operators. But, the operators faced high cost of fuel and of repair and maintenance cost due to unskilled operation. Thus, the government should establish a network of harvester service operators as well as encourage more maintenance training for local operator in order to high utilization efficiency in rice combine harvester. Also, the government should support farmer to expand their farm sizes by the establishment of a group farmer to easy access the use of rice combine harvester and should give wider farmer awareness education for higher adoption of combine harvester use.</p>
Highlights
In Thailand, mechanization has played a key role in agricultural production, especially for rice combine harvesters due to labor shortages in rice harvesting
In the Northeast area, rice combine harvester service can be divided into two groups: individual operators and group operators
Individual operators of rice combine harvester services can be classified into two types (1) Rice combine harvester service operator from areas outside the Northeast area such as Uthai Thani, Prachin Buri, Ang Thong and Suphan Buri; the number of these operators has decreased to around 10% during the production year 2014/2015
Summary
In Thailand, mechanization has played a key role in agricultural production, especially for rice combine harvesters due to labor shortages in rice harvesting. Rice harvesting in area is a significant issue for farmers because of labor scarcity and high labor costs leading to increase production costs during at the time of rice harvesting. In these regards, the number of agricultural labor has declined from 57.71% in 2001 to 36.30% in 2011 (Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board, 2014) because of the migration of agricultural labor to industrial sector and entering aging society; as a result, rice combine harvester services are popular among farmers. Rice combine harvester services have played an important role for harvesting wet-dry season rice in the Northeast area from rice harvester operators in local areas and other provinces.
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