After IRRI released miracle rice, harvesting, threshing, and cleaning the increased volume of rice became an overnight problem. It was a chore to beat the straw and panicles to separate the grain. With few threshing machines available, the wet straw wrapped around the drum, thus choking it. This created an agricultural engineering design challenge. The axial flow thresher was finally evolved from the engineering shop of IRRI. An industrial extension programme assisted local manufacturers to produce the design. Today, the axial flow thresher is widely used in all of Asia, save in a few locations. Nearly every manufacturer among the different countries is now said to have developed an improved version of IRRI's original design.
