Vol. 5, Issue 1, Part A (2023)

In West Shawa Zone where this research endeavored to introduce Jimma made multi crop thresher, the most common methods of threshing a variety of crops is traditional. It involves striking the crops panicle with stick or trampling under animal hooves and winnowing it by tossing the threshed mixed mass in the air when there is enough wind to separate the chaff from grain on ogdi. This method is inefficient, slow, prone to drudgery as well as the time taken and the labor required are considerably high along with the problem of contamination of grains with extraneous material such as dung, urine and sand. To obviate these all, a multi crop thresher for major cereal crops was developed at JAERC and intended to demonstrate in Toke Kutaye and Liban Jawi districts with the specific objectives of building farmers awareness of Jimma MCT and its potential uses; evaluating the machine for its performance in terms of threshing efficiency, capacity and total threshing losses and eliciting farmers and other stakeholders’ feedback that can be used as an important data source for further refinement of the machine demonstrated. The participants were both extension functionaries and the purposively selected farmers from the areas where production of teff, wheat and maize are collectively predominating. data entailed Weight of the threshed grain, un threshed grains, damaged grains, time of operation, no of farmers participated in awareness creation training and field days, and feedback information were collected through a variety of indices of measurement, reckoning techniques and focus group discussions. It was found that the thresher could thresh the crops to a threshing efficiency of 91, 92, and 98.5% for teff wheat and maize; the output capacities of 69.09, 110.5 and 930 kg/hr for the same crops were satisfactory; and threshing loss of 12.9 and 10.9% achieved for teff and wheat respectively was rather high. Hence, the recommendation to pre scaling up the machine for maize threshing and on how to improve for teff and wheat were provided.