Assessment of pre and post harvest losses in soyabean crop in Rajasthan

In this paper, pre and post harvest losses have been estimated for Soyabean crop in Rajasthan by using the field survey data collected from a total 120 sample farmers comprised of 28 marginal, 30 small, 37 medium and 25 large farmers. Soyabean crop is rich in protein as well as fat, vulnerable to infestation by insects, mites and contains more moisture, makes it prone to the infection by fungi. The crop is attacked by a number of insects, pests during the life cycle. The Pre-harvest losses are due to pests, disease and weed infestation was 2.38 and 2.27 quintals per acre for local and high yielding varieties of soyabean respectively. The per centage of loss over actual production was 31 per cent for local and 26.16 for HYV soyabean. Actual and normal production per acre was higher for HYV than local variety of soyabean and also loss of output per quintal is slightly lower in case of HYV than local variety. So even though, the magnitude of crop loss is high in both varieties loss is comparatively low for HYV of soyabean. The total post harvest loss was 3.41 kg per quintal and it varied between 2.70 kg per quintals for large farmers and 4.38 kg per quintals for small farmers. The quantity lost per quintal in various stages worked out to be 1.45 kg in harvesting, 0.85 kg in threshing, 0.11 kg in winnowing, 0.21 kg in transportation, 0.14 kg in handling and in storage 0.65 kg.