Modified reaper for small-scale farmers: an approach for sustainable agriculture

Existing reapers for farming purposes are out of reach for small-scale farmers due to their high cost, and they are also unavailable in most rural locations due to transportation or financial constraints. There has recently been a demand for a compact, cost-efficient, more accessible, and effective crop reaper that can be operated by small-scale farmers. As a result, a cost-effective, farmer-friendly, and efficient crop reaper was developed in the present work, and its cutting efficiency was found to be improved as compared to the existing self-propelled reaper. Moreover, earlier works were either based on development of farm-based machinery and their performance or ergonomic aspects’ evaluation without any emphasis on its sustainability in agriculture. Thus, in this study, apart from performance, an ergonomic evaluation and “strength, weakness, opportunity, and threats (SWOT)” analysis were performed on the existing and modified reapers. Furthermore, for the framework design and assessment of the sustainability of the modified reaper in the agricultural sectors, both “fuzzy logic” and metaheuristics-based optimization algorithms such as “Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)” were utilized. Given the prevalence of small-scale farmers with limited farm sizes, the findings of this study may be relevant for more sustainable developments in the existing tools and equipment used in agriculture that can be easily affordable and utilized by all the farming community around the world.