I am a little surprised that cracking and breakage of the beans is being soley blamed on combines. Unfortunately, here in Oz, the problem occurs whenever we have heavy [ by our standards! ] summer rains on ripe pulse crops. The pulses, ie. peas, beans, chickpeas and etc are notorious for cracking and splitting if we get a 1_2" or 1" of rain and a couple of days of cool damp weather following the rain after they are ripe and ready for combining. The seeds of pulses absorb water very easily and quickly. The seed then swells inside of the coat and actually begins the early part of the growing process which entails chemical changes from starch to sugars inside of the seed. When it gets dry, the seed dries out and shrinks within its seed coat usually leaving a slightly loose seed coat. The chemical changes that have taken place within the seed itself are irreversible and will also have made the seed more brittle when dry. With a loose seed coat and a more brittle seed, quite severe splitting and cracking of the seed is then very likely when combining. It gets much worse when we have 2 or 3 cycles of wetting and drying. Cheers!