Minimising manpower in rice harvesting and transportation operations

Manpower is an important input parameter for both strategic and tactical management levels in agricultural production systems, connected to management tasks such as capacity planning, task times planning, and scheduling. In large scale field operations manpower surplus can lead to an unnecessary increase in operational cost, while, on the other hand, manpower shortages in the absence of appropriate planning can lead to reduced productivity with a high risk for timeliness costs. In this paper, the simulation model reported by Busato [Busato, 2015, A simulation model for a rice-harvesting chain. Biosystems Engineering, 129, 149-159] was extended to incorporate the functionality of the minimisation of manpower in large scale field operations, such as crop harvesting and transportation. Specifically, the model implements the practice where the number of transport units' operators is lower than the number of transport units. The simulation model was validated based on measurements in two harvesting and transport operations. The deviation of the predicted operation parameters as compared to the measured ones was relatively low. Specifically, for the case of area capacity the error in the prediction was 2.2% and 2%, respectively, compared to the measured area capacity in the two operations. Regarding the practice of the reduced number of operators, it was shown that there are significant reductions in required manpower use when fewer operators than the number of transport units are implemented in the operation. For the specific transport units-operators configurations examined, the reduction of manpower use (h ha−1) was in the range of 12%-30%.