CHANDIGARH: The advent of combine harvesters in Punjab, Haryana and UP, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is being blamed for the practice of burning crop stubble. To save time and money, as well as to tackle labour shortage , more and more farmers are opting for mechanical harvesting of crops using combine harvesters.Farmers say the blades of combine harvesters don’t cut the crops close to the ground, and leaves the plant stalk, usually up to two feet high, standing.Sarabjit Singh, a farmer from Virpur village of Bijnor district in UP, said the people who operate combine harvesters don’t cut the crop close to the ground since they are more concerned about getting the grain. “The operators try to clear the maximum possible area in a day since they charge per acre. Hence, they leave the task of clearing the crop to the farmers. The crop stalk is very high at times,” he added.Farmers find it difficult to plough the crop residue back into the soil using harrows and, instead, resort to burning the stubble to clear the fields for the next crop. The problem is more pronounced in the winter, with little time available for farmers to prepare the fields for sowing wheat after harvesting paddy.The prevailing rates for harvesting paddy using combine harvesters in north India are in the range of Rs 1,300-1,500 per acre. On the other hand, labour charges of harvesting paddy manually are around Rs 1,600 per acre, a practice more prevalent in UP, MP and parts of Haryana. Another farmer, Baljinder Singh Sidhu from Kotbhara village in Punjab’s Bathinda district, said the days of manual harvesting were better: “Earlier, when paddy was manually harvested, the crop was cut close to the ground. While the grain was obtained after threshing, the leftover plant stalk or straw was stored as fodder for cattle.” Sadhu Singh , director of Akhtiar Agro King , an agriculture machinery manufacturing unit in Moga , said the problem was acute in Punjab since the farmers don’t consider paddy straw to be of any use.“In case of wheat, the combine harvesters usually cut the crop close to the surface. However, farmers in Punjab don’t keep paddy straw, so they don’t insist on a close cut for the crop,” he added.