Post by PatIt is all a question of floatation. The plastic lays on the stubble.
As the bundles are placed on it the plastic is pulled ahead to bend
the stubble. The bundles are spread over the plastic to allow the
load to float on the bending stubble. Where the hovercraft floats on a
ocean of air the plastic is floating on a ocean of stubble.
If bundles are used there some losses of grain but bundles are useful
as a measure and handleing when drying.
The bicycle advantage is it makes a single rut where the following
wheel rolls frees in the rut made by the first wheel. The two wheeled
cart makes two ruts.
The government agent should be measuring the crop, determining the
moisture content, and looking at, the losses, the number of grains
left in the field. Not for taxes but for learning the production of
each area. The numbers determine good and bad practices of each
region.
I would guess that an old woman using plastic to move the bundles from
the field to the road and a bicycle on the road to move the bundles to
the thresher would be able to do the work of two farmers using poles.
--Pat
OK, here's some more on that line of thought.
If you have a semirigid but very flexible piece of slippery plastic,
similar to a roll-up toboggan for snow, and put a perimiter on it, say
of something like a pool noodle so that the noodle is enclosed and the
whole works is waterproof at that point and floats even if it's got a
load on it.
The noodle is only a means of keeping all the rice on the sled in dry
conditions. In wet conditions, the rice could be harvested anyway
because it would float, or if there are puddles from recent rain or
whatever, the puddle wouldn't get soaked into the rice that's on the
sled.
Have a rope threaded through the noodles, and have it accessible from
both ends of the sled. Then when you're up on the ground two people
could pick the whole sled up, or one person could pick the whole works
up as a rolled up carrier, and hike the bundle of rice over your back
to wherever the truck is. Two people one on each end to dump the load
into the truck.
If the ground is too soft, you could use snowshoes or similar to walk
the field. I doubt that will help with a submerged field, but it would
certainly help both with flotation of a human and with traction to pull
the sled.
If you can find a source for plastic and some pool noodles, the
materials cost would be something around $10 for a sled. You could
easily make one of them in an evening after you found your materials
sources, and see how well it works before investing more time and
effort.
If that works well, you could have a similar thing with a very small
lift motor on it and a skirt, probably stiffer, that would be dragged
around without power while in the field and hover to make the trip home
easier. Or park it, load it up until it gets too tough to walk it that
far, and then move it to the next spot. The lift motor need not pick
the whole thing up, it only needs to make it easier to drag. That
feature will multiply the cost and complexity by a huge margin though.