I spent many years working with a combine harvester manufacturer in Europe, and then more years travelling around eastern England assessing grain losses on various makes of combine. As has been said, 2% to 5% is the average through the combine and many farmers, do not know what that looks like. We used a wire frame 12 inches by 12 inches placed in the swath behind the combine then counted to grains in the frame. If a farmer saw more that 10 to 12 grains he would start complaining about losing grain but, on average, that number of grains worked out at about 1/4%. We had a series of boards with grains stuck on them to demonstrate what a grain loss of 2% looked like and most farmers were horrified.
The greatest area of combine loss was from dropped heads at the cutter bar and shelled out grain from the reel. Another area was from trying to get too clean a sample and overloading the returns system leading to a trail of grain from either the sieve pan or the straw walkers depending where the returns were fed back into the machine.
With the advent of straw choppers and spreaders most people do not check grain loss even though they have monitors. Monitors are only as good as the operator who adjusts them. I met many operators who believed that, if he adjusted the monitor to show no grain loss, he was doing a good job no matter how much was going over the back.
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Today's Featured Article - Harvestin Hay: The Early Years (Part 2) - by Pat Browning. The summer of 1950 was the start of a new era in farming for our family. I was thirteen, and Kathy (my oldest sister) was seven. At this age, I believed tractor farming was the only way, hot stuff -- and given a chance I probably would have used the tractor, Dad's first, a 1936 Model "A" John Deere, to go bring in the cows! And I think Dad was ready for some automation too. And so it was that we acquired a good, used J. I. Case, wire tie hay baler. In addition to a person to drive th
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