An Innovative System for Maize Cob and Wheat Chaff Harvesting: Simultaneous Grain and Residues Collection

Simone Bergonzoli, Alessandro Suardi, Negar Rezaie, Vincenzo Alfano and Luigi Pari
Additional contact information
Simone Bergonzoli: Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricotura e l’Analisi dell’Economia Agraria (CREA), Centro di Ricerca Ingegneria e Trasformazioni Agroalimentari, 24047 Milan, Italy
Alessandro Suardi: Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricotura e l’Analisi dell’Economia Agraria (CREA), Centro di Ricerca Ingegneria e Trasformazioni Agroalimentari, 00015 Rome, Italy
Negar Rezaie: Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricotura e l’Analisi dell’Economia Agraria (CREA), Centro di Ricerca Ingegneria e Trasformazioni Agroalimentari, 00015 Rome, Italy
Vincenzo Alfano: Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricotura e l’Analisi dell’Economia Agraria (CREA), Centro di Ricerca Ingegneria e Trasformazioni Agroalimentari, 00015 Rome, Italy
Luigi Pari: Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricotura e l’Analisi dell’Economia Agraria (CREA), Centro di Ricerca Ingegneria e Trasformazioni Agroalimentari, 00015 Rome, Italy

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 5, 1-15

Abstract: Maize and wheat are two of the most widespread crops worldwide because of their high yield and importance for food, chemical purposes and livestock feed. Some of the residues of these crops (i.e., maize cob and wheat chaff) remain in the field after grain harvesting. In Europe, just maize cob and grain chaff could provide an annual potential biomass of 9.6 Mt and 54.8 Mt, respectively. Collecting such a biomass could be of interest for bioenergy production and could increase farmers’ income. Progress in harvest technology plays a key role in turning untapped by-products into valuable feedstocks. This article presents a study of the performance and the quality of the work of Harcob, an innovative system developed for maize cob collection. Furthermore, the feasibility of using the Harcob system to also harvest wheat chaff during wheat harvesting was also verified. The results showed that it was possible to harvest 1.72 t ha −1 and 0.67 t ha −1 of cob and chaff, respectively, without affecting the harvesting performance of the combine. The profit achievable from harvesting the corn cob was around 4%, while no significant economic benefits were observed during the harvesting of wheat chaff with the Harcob system. The use of cereal by-products for energy purposes may allow the reduction of CO 2 from fossil fuel between 0.7 to 2.2 t CO 2 ha −1 . The Harcob system resulted suitable to harvest such different and high potential crop by-products and may represent a solution for farmers investing in the bioenergy production chain.

Keywords: bioenergy; crop by-products; harvesting methods; maize cob; wheat chaff; combine harvesting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/5/1265/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/5/1265/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:13:y:2020:i:5:p:1265-:d:330199

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().