Driving back from Thirumanaseer. To Chennai we passed a lot of harvesting activity. It looks like it is the middle of the rice harvest, and some sugar cane too. I got some pictures of the rice harvest but not the sugar cane where the trucks have a longer haul to the mill and when loaded they look like a funnel where the top of the load is way wider than the width at truck bed height (1400mm as all good SWL folks will know LOL)
The rice is harvested in some cases mechanically, and sometimes by hand. The straw with the grain is loaded on to a trailer, and bought nearer the storage area or where it is bagged for sale. Sometimes it arrives on a truck but more often on a trailer behind a farm tractor. We saw some places where the straw is laid out on the road and the trucks and cars drive over the straw and by doing so separate the grain, which is collected on a tarp under the straw. Sounds quite efficient unless the grain gets crushed and there is waste.
It also looks like that when the grain is separated that some of it requires further drying, and so it is spread out on the road and guarded with logs to prevent those pesky cars from using that piece of road until the grain is dry. Make sense if you are the farmer I guess. I think that some is stored for home use and some sold on the open market.
For the sugar cane there will be a large central processing factory and I think that it will either be run by the state or possible a farmers co-op.
