It can’t, though. I mean, I’m sure someone could develop a device that would lift and cut lodged grain, but I am unaware of anyone that has. Standard harvesting equipment is incapable of cutting grain that’s lying flat on the ground.
The grain on stalks trampled to the ground is likely to get wet and rot. It is also unlikely to be fully mature
The last thing the farmer wants is to harvest it.
Combine harvesters have a leading edge designed to lift flattened stalks. However, there is no way it can be as effective on flat stalks as upright, so there will be some loss.
Based on your location, you grew up in America. The OP is about the UK, where farmers are much, much more likely to own a (shot)gun than your average joe public.
Huh?
A combine fitted with a pick-up (as seen here) will indeed lift stalks off the ground. But it can’t cut them. It’s designed to pick up a swath. If you ran it over a crop circle, it would do no more than rake through the flattened grain.
On the other hand, if you’ve got a header on the combine (as seen here), it will cut, but can’t lift. You could drop the table right onto the ground, but it’s exceedingly sub-optimal. Any unevenness in the terrain will result in your knife bar being pushed through the dirt, and you still won’t actually cut much of the grain.
A corn header actually does lift and cut, but isn’t much good for cereals, since it only works in row-crops.
If a crop is only partially lodged, as is frequently the case when it happens naturally, with very few spots actually completely flat on the ground, then the standard practice is to dig the old swather out from behind that hedge, whip it into semi-operable condition, drop the knife bar as far as possible, and cut whatever you can. The extra wear incurred from digging into the dirt is no big deal, since the swather in question isn’t used anymore except in similar cases - possibly it also gets used to cut hay in ditches, another job hazardous to machinery. But with crop completely and utterly flattened as is generally the case with circles, I really don’t see how one could cut any significant portion of the flattened crop with standard harvesting equipment. As I said, I’m sure it would be possible to contrive something that would lift and cut it, but to my knowledge no such devices are commercially available, nor would there be sufficient demand to develop anything. Quite possibly some farmer’s kludged something together that works, but these would be one-off machines.
I’ve worked a couple of harvests and the combine harvesters had leading tines that would lift stalks enought to cut them. These were stalks flattened to the extent that you see in wind damage. Here http://www.deutz-fahr.de/english/erntemaschinen/5670/schneidwerk.php is an advertisement for a harvester that claims to handle flattened stalks. However, I recognize that there is a big difference between wind damage and crop circles in terms of how beaten down the stalks are.
Are you talking corn, or cereal grains? I’m looking at your link, and the only lifting tines I see are on the corn header - “The flat design means that even down maize can be picked up cleanly.” The tines you see in the picture captioned “The knife sections of the tandem cutting system” are just plain vanilla knife guards that you’d find on every swather, combine, and mower in existence. If they’re doing any lifting, your knives are in the dirt, which would be bad. The only other features it has to assist in cutting flattened crop are general features allowing the cutting bar to be very low to the ground - it’s what’s called a floating header. It levels itself relative to the ground, so for example if your left tire goes through a dip, the left side of the header doesn’t dig into the ground.
I will, however, take your word for it that you worked with a machine that had lifting tines in the front. I’ve never seen such, except for corn headers.
amarone writes:
> Based on your location, you grew up in America. The OP is about the UK, where
> farmers are much, much more likely to own a (shot)gun than your average joe
> public.
Based on your location, you’re American too, so how do you know that? I lived in the U.K. for three years. I find it hard to believe that British farmers are accustomed to blowing away intruders with a shotgun.
Haven’t any of you been to a farm? You’ve got stalks of wheat or corn that easily conceal a person, and it’s frigging dark at night-- there aren’t likely to be streetlamps conveniently located around the crop-- so spotting someone is very unlikely.
I didn’t say that British farmers are accustomed to blowing away intruders. I responded to your comment
saying that that is not the case in the UK. I lived for 35 years in the UK, mostly in rural areas, including working on a couple of farms. For more definitive proof, it is tough to search on gun statistics without getting mired in gun and anti-gun control sites, but this link does use “farmers” in when referencing shotguns.
And here includes statistics on gun certificates by county, which shows higher gun ownership in the rural counties, despite having generally smaller populations.
Actually, the reason farmers are much more likely to own guns that anyone else in the UK is because the “anyone else” don’t own guns, generally speaking, whereas farmers usually do for what they deem to be a necessary part of their livelihood.
As for blowing away intruders, there is one famous case of a farmer doing just that. See here for many articles on it. The fact that it generated such a lot of press column inches indicates how rare it is.
I’m talking about cereal. It sounds like I should bow to your greater knowledge on this one. I’m just going by what I observed. I suspect that I saw what you call “plain vanilla knife guards”. They weren’t in the dirt, but seemed to have the effect of lifting stalks that were laid over (but not flat), and I assumed that an element of lifting was intended in their design.
Well, I can’t speak authoritatively on the full range of harvesting equipment used everywhere, but I did grow up on a farm in Saskatchewan, and am hence rather familiar with combines. Knife guards exist primarily to provide a shearing surface for the knife bar to cut against, and are shaped in that pointy fashion in order to guide stalks into the gaps between them where the cutting takes place. Since they’re only a few inches long, and extend forward horizontally, they don’t have a lot of lifting potential. If they were longer, and could point at an angle down and forward, kinda like the fingers on a barber’s hair clippers, then they might be able to aid in salvaging lodged crop. But they’d need to be modified so that they wouldn’t actually dig into the ground, but rather kinda ski along over the surface. Shouldn’t be too hard to develop, but as I said I’m unaware of anyone who has.
In the UK most combine harvesters have crop lifters fitted to every 4th knife section, they are about 15 inches long and are made from spring steel so that they can slide on the ground if required. They work best if the ground is hard, the field is level, and there are no rocks!