SYNERGISTIC AUTOMATION IN BURLEY HARVESTING AND MARKET PREPARATION1

Abstract

Abstract A computerized analysis has been conducted to determine the comparative annual costs of various harvesting/market preparation systems for burley tobacco. The CATCH223 model developed at the University of Kentucky computes the annual costs of alternative systems that facilitate harvesting and/or market preparation at a time rate(s) prescribed by a producer or analyst. Harvesting systems that utilized the most manual labor had the lowest annual costs for crop sizes analyzed between 4 and 40 ha, although the advantage of manual vs mechanized systems diminished as crop size increased. On the other hand, the analysis shows that mechanized market preparation systems have consistently lower annual costs than conventional methods that require manual removal and grading of cured leaves. Finally, the analysis shows that a fully automated harvesting system (having the highest projected annual cost of all of the alternatives) can be combined with an automated market preparation system resulting in a total an...