There are efficient harvesters in modern agriculture, but were there harvesters in ancient times?

Like other farm tools, harvesting farm tools in China have gone through a long development process. During the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, people harvested simple stone knives, clam knives and stone sickles. With the appearance of bronzes, tools such as copper shovel (a short sickle) and copper sickle appeared. During the Warring States period, people mastered the technology of smelting iron, and copper shovels and sickles were gradually replaced by stronger shovels and sickles.

During the Western Han Dynasty, the iron sickle became the most important harvesting tool. From the Western Han Dynasty to modern times, sickle has always been one of the most important agricultural tools in farmers' hands and made great contributions to agricultural society. Unfortunately, the working face of sickle is small and the harvesting speed is slow. Therefore, people began to try to invent a sickle with large harvesting range and high efficiency. Automatic sickle pushing appeared in Song and Yuan Dynasties.

Wang Zhen's agricultural book "Atlas of Farm Tools" in Yuan Dynasty introduced the structure and size of the push sickle in detail, and described the shape of the push sickle in the form of pictures. The sickle is made of wood, and the handle is about seven feet long, which is easy to hold. One end touching the ground is divided into two forks, and the sickle is embedded in the fork. The middle of the two forks is connected by a cross bar, and each end of the cross bar has a small wheel. When in use, the farmer holds the wooden handle and pushes the sickle to push rice and wheat in the crop field.

With the rolling of the wooden wheel, wheat straw and rice straw are cut off one after another, which saves both labor and time. The working mode of pushing sickle is similar to that of modern hand-pushed wheat harvester. "Agricultural Book" emphasizes that pushing the sickle "pushes the Jiesheng wheel uphill", that is to say, this tool can be easily operated in uneven fields, and the operation is simple. The sickle pusher can be said to be an ancient harvester in China.

Summary: Unfortunately, this harvesting tool was later lost. After Uncle Nong appeared, someone copied the sickle according to the introduction in the book, but it was not very successful and could not reproduce the legendary high efficiency.

Modern scholars have raised objections to the working efficiency of the push sickle, and think that from the perspective of modern mechanical principles, the push harvester can only push down rice stalks and wheat stalks without scissors cutting device, and no matter how sharp the sickle is, it can't be cut off smoothly. Contrary to this view, some scholars fully affirmed the advanced nature of this harvesting tool. In any case, pushing the sickle is a bold innovation of the ancients in harvesting tools, but there is no doubt about it.