Harvesting, threshing and winnowing are the final operations which play the significant role in realizing the
full benefit of raised crop. The morphological characteristics of paddy plant are essential to know for operating settings
of the harvesting machineries. The single grain detachment and stripping force are important parameters for design
and development of different mechanism for threshing. The morphological characteristics of paddy plant, physical
properties of paddy grain, single grain detachment force, panicle stripping force, bulk density and paddy uprooting
force were studied following the standard procedures. The Ratnagiri-1 is popular variety of Konkan selected for this
study. The morphological characteristics of paddy plant like plant height, plant dropping height, panicle height, panicle
length and stem diameter were found to be 851.7, 744.6, 648.1, 203.6, and 1.77 mm respectively with number of tillers
per hill to be 9.07. Thousand grain weights were found to be in the range from 29.27 to 27.77 g and 31.11 to 29.37 g at
19.90 and 22.05 % moisture content (wb) respectively. The maximum single grain detachment force was found to be
3.07 N at 19.47 per cent moisture content (wb). The maximum stripping force for paddy panicle was found to be 20.59 N
at 22 to 26 per cent moisture content of (wb). The single grain detachment and stripping force for paddy panicle found
to be decreased in magnitude with decrease in moisture content. The minimum paddy uprooting force was found to be
19.4 kg at 35.09 per cent moisture content of soil, where as maximum uprooting force for paddy was found to be 40.2 kg
at 17.5 per cent moisture content of soil.
