[broken-kebab]

I'm afraid you just dismissed the question, not answered it. Plenty of things changed in agriculture in spite of simple inertia. Why does sickle-for-wheat-scythe-for-hay concept seem to prevail for different cultures in distant lands for so long?

[crabbone]

Well, with a sickle you hold what you cut, and then you bind it together, so the grain doesn't fall on the ground. With a scythe you will have to somehow pick it up and organize in such a way that you can later collect it (without much dirt stuck to it etc.)

NB. In high-school, I worked one summer cleaning and otherwise maintaining the local after-school building. It had a huge lawn behind it, which I had to trim with a scythe once every few weeks. So, I thought I knew how to do that reasonably well...

And then, one day, some years later, me and few friends of mine went on a trip into the mountains, and we put our tent, as we later discovered, on some farmer's field. He got mad at us, and wanted us to cut the grass for him, as a form of compensation. Using a scythe on an incline, as opposed to flat surface is a... whole different story. I lodged it into the ground a few times, and then the farmer almost killed us :) In the end, we bought him some alcohol and left.

So, the moral of the story: scythe might not be always the best tool, and in some situations it's far from obvious how to use it efficiently.

[haccount]

A high speed processor And lidar with digital blade angle control will probably make it work effortlessly on an incline too.

[crabbone]

But what about wearing a red checkered flannel shirt with a denim overall? Rolling up your sleeves, sweating like hell and working yourself into exhaustion to come back to your tent at the nightfall and bake potatoes and fish underneath a campfire?

You just took away all the fun from the process :)

[supermatt]

It’s quite common to use a scythe with a “cradle” when cutting grain.

Scythes are amazing for cutting on an incline. You need to work along the incline, not down the incline, and will take shorter strokes.

[crabbone]

Pretty sure the farmer who spooked us knew how to do that too. It's just an example of how someone who, even though had some experience with the tool, still didn't know how to use it in a novel context.

[burnte]

I didn't dismiss it at all. I directly answered you. While plenty of things change despite inertia, plenty of things do NOT change. We've known about the benefits of no till, cover crops, crop rotation, etc. for centuries and they're still not common due to inertia. In the USA we know that government subsidies for corn have massively distorted the market and had huge negative impacts on health and the environment, but we don't change due to inertia. Water management something we're terrible at in the US despite having the knowledge of how to do it better, but we don't because of inertia. Don't underestimate the power of "we've always done it this way." People can come up with a thousand bad reasons not to do something.

In my company, another leader forced his division to stop using a manual tracking spreadsheet because it was wasting time. People HATED the idea of stopping it, expecting there to be huge issues, but the manager was right, all the information was already reliably recorded in other systems and this was just a wasteful manual copy. When people stopped using it, literally nothing went wrong or changed, no one needed it, but now everyone got back 15 minutes of their day. But people resisted because "we've always done it this way."

As another poster said, grain loss is more likely with these less-hand-labor-intensive methods, and people can overvalue the loss of that small amount despite the time and energy savings of scythes. So people might think, "I'll lose 3% of my harvest doing that, I can't afford that" except they'd expend 15% of the energy harvesting and thus that 3% loss is more than balanced out by the 85% time savings and the reduced work load. You can spend a fraction of that saved time making up the 3% difference in a hundred other ways.

People are very resistant to change. A lack of education produces lapses in logic and critical thinking and thus people won't evaluate the change in the right frame of reference.

[vdupras]

I'm not sure, but what I've read is that there's a loss of grain associated with using the scythe on wheat when it falls on the ground. Maybe it's a concern in some areas.

But I think that with a proper apparel such as the one we see in the video on the website, the fall can be made gentler while still keeping the significant efficiency gain that the scythe offers over the sickle.