Жатвенные машины: история и современные технологии

Harvesting machine

A reaper is a farm implement or person that reaps (cuts and often also gathers) crops at harvest when they are ripe. Usually the crop involved is a cereal grass. The first documented reaping machines were Gallic reapers that were used in Roman times in what would become modern day France. The Gallic reaper involved a comb which collected the heads, with an operator knocking the grain into a box for later threshing. Most modern mechanical reapers cut grass; most also gather it, either by windrowing or picking it up. Modern machines that not only cut and gather the grass but also thresh its seeds (the grain), winnow the grain, and deliver it to a truck or wagon, called combine harvesters or simply combines, which are the engineering descendants of earlier reapers. Hay is harvested somewhat differently from grain; in modern haymaking, the machine that cuts the grass is called a hay mower or, if integrated with a conditioner, a mower conditioner. As a manual task, cutting of both grain and hay may be called reaping, involving scythes, sickles, and cradles, followed by differing downstream steps. Traditionally all such cutting could be called reaping, although a distinction between reaping of grain grasses and mowing of hay grasses has long existed; it was only after a decade of attempts at combined grain reaper/hay mower machines (1830s to 1840s) that designers of mechanical implements began resigning them to separate classes. Mechanical reapers substantially changed agriculture from their appearance in the 1830s until the 1860s through 1880s, when they evolved into related machines, often called by different names (self raking reaper, harvester, reaper binder, grain binder, binder), that collected and bound the sheaves of grain with wire or twine.

Hand reaping is done by various means, including plucking the ears of grains directly by hand, cutting the grain stalks with a sickle, cutting them with a scythe, or a scythe fitted with a grain cradle. Reaping is usually distinguished from mowing, which uses similar implements, but is the traditional term for cutting grass for hay, rather than reaping cereals. The stiffer, dryer straw of the cereal plants and the greener grasses for hay usually demand different blades on the machines. The reaped grain stalks are gathered into sheaves (bunches), tied with string or with a twist of straw. Several sheaves are then leant against each other with the ears off the ground to dry out, forming a stook. After drying, the sheaves are gathered from the field and stacked, being placed with the ears inwards, then covered with thatch or a tarpaulin; this is called a stack or rick. In the British Isles a rick of sheaves is traditionally called a corn rick, to distinguish it from a hay rick ("corn" in British English retains its older sense of "grain" generally, not "maize"). Ricks are made in an area inaccessible to livestock, called a rick yard or stack yard. The corn rick is later broken down and the sheaves threshed to separate the grain from the straw. Collecting spilt grain from the field after reaping is called gleaning, and is traditionally done either by hand, or by penning animals such as chickens or pigs onto the field. Hand reaping is now rarely done in industrialized countries, but is still the normal method where machines are unavailable or where access for them is limited (such as on narrow terraces). The more or less skeletal figure of a reaper with a scythe – known as the "Grim Reaper" – is a common personification of death in many Western traditions and cultures. In this metaphor, death harvests the living, like a farmer harvests the crops.

A mechanical reaper or reaping machine is a mechanical, semi automated device that harvests crops. Mechanical reapers and their descendant machines have been an important part of mechanized agriculture and a main feature of agricultural productivity.

After the first reapers were developed and patented, other slightly different reapers were distributed by several manufacturers throughout the world. The Champion (Combined) Reapers and Mowers, produced by the Champion Interest group (Champion Machine Company, later Warder, Bushnell & Glessner, absorbed in IHC 1902) in Springfield, Ohio in the second half of the 19th century, were highly successful in the 1880s in the United States. Springfield is still known as "The Champion City". Generally, reapers developed into the 1872 invented reaper binder, which reaped the crop and bound it into sheaves. By 1896, 400,000 reaper binders were estimated to be harvesting grain. This was in turn replaced by the swather and eventually the combine harvester, which reaps and threshes in one operation. In Central European agriculture reapers were – together with reaper binders – common machines until the mid 20th century.