This study was undertaken to investigate the load characteristics of the head-feed thresher, which may be affected by various factors such as physical properties of grain, thresher design parameters and its operational condition. The study was conducted at an initial step toward developing an automatic feed-rate control system of the head-feed thresher. A microcomputer-based data acquisition system for the load-speed characteristic of the thresher-shaft and the rail-deflection of the feeding device in accordance with a varied feeding thickness was developed. The sensors being developed and used for sensing the torque and speed of the cylinder and the power-input-shaft and the feeding thickness showed a high accuracy. A microcomputer-based data acquisition system developed in this study was assessed as adequate for a rapid acquisition and analysis of data. The effect of the feed-rate on the torque and speed of the thresher shaft, when fed intermittently by bundles, affected not by the rice varieties but by the dryness of threshing material tested. When fed by the continuous constant thickness, the torque and speed of the cylinder due to the increase of the feed-rate or feeding thickness were given by the relation by the second order parabola.