Mechanical Harvesting of Chickpea in North Karnataka: Problems and Prospects

This paper has studied the problems and prospects for mechanical harvesting of chickpea in the districts of Gulbarga and Dharwad in Karnataka by selecting 120 chickpea growers (60 from each district) and 11 chickpea progressive farmers. The study revealed that majority of sample farmers harvested chickpea engaging human labour and threshing operation was carried out with multi-crop threshers. Some farmers had tried to harvest the chickpea crop with multi-crop harvesters, the grown variety Annigeri-1 was not suitable for mechanical harvesting. Also, there was scattering of pods due to high temperature and damage/split of grains. The major constraints in adoption of mechanical harvesting of chickpea were non-availability of suitable chickpea varieties (85–86%) and machines (81–90%). A few progressive farmers have grown GBM-2 variety in past two seasons and harvested the crop with multi-crop harvesters with slight modifications in the existing machines used for pigeonpea. The mechanical harvesting of the crop not only reduced the cost substantially but also saved the time of harvesting. Efforts should be made to popularize the erect type chickpea varieties among farmers of the state.