Agricultural Mechanization

Agricultural Mechanization

Khilendra Basnyat

Underdeveloped economies are essentially agricultural economies. Everywhere the proportion of working population in agricultural pursuits is very high, reaching more than 60% in many of cordilleran states of Latin America, 70% in much of the East South East Asia and a still higher percentage in Africa. Since the percentage of people depending on agricultural pursuits is very high, it is the crying need of most governments to bring about development of this sector.

Modern men, in fact, have developed several methods to boost agricultural production, of which agricultural mechanization is one. Despite the fact that developed countries have reaped some benefits from farm mechanization, the idea that it is the main reason for higher yield in these countries can not be accepted because recent experience with hybrid seeds of wheat and rice showed that improved seeds coupled with fertilizer and adequate water fetch higher yield. In some countries, there has been a three to four fold increase in agricultural production through the adoption of above techniques. Apart from this, millions of farmers of Southeast Asian Countries have obtained more agricultural yield by using hybrid seeds.

In developed countries, agricultural mechanization is of supreme importance. The reason: in these countries agriculture is commercialized, and forms an integral part of a monetary economy. In these countries, output is for sale, and final consumption may take place very far from the farm on which the crop is grown. The requirements of commercial farmers household are bought from the proceeds of the sale of farm products, and the commercial farmers expect to receive a reasonable return on the capital invested in the farm and a profit to encourage them to remain in business.

In developing economies, what the farmer receives in return for his labor depends primarily on bounty or otherwise of nature and his social obligations. He may be compelled to turn over half or more of his agricultural yield to the landlord or to dispose of it to money- lenders or middlemen at a substantial discount. Hence, farm mechanization is somewhat improbable for him.

In developed countries, the use of more and bigger machinery is largely responsible for the withering away of the small farm. In the United States, for example, the farm size was 167 acres in 1940. Now it is estimated to be 400 acres. In this country, the small farmers, who cannot afford to buy the specialized equipment is forced to rent it which puts him at a considerable economic disadvantage. As a result, he has gradually been replaced by large-scale farmers and agribusiness men who have access to large amount of capital to compete with. In developing countries there are many small farmers. This is why it is difficult to adopt farm mechanization technique.

Farm mechanization needs adequate quantity of fossil fuels. This is evidenced by the fact that powering the 5 million tractors in the United States requires 8billion gallons of fuel. This amount of synthetic fossil fuel energy is equal to the amount of chemical energy in the food products of American agriculture. Thus the use of tractor fuel on U.S. farms has surpassed the energy conversion of sunlight for a given unit of agricultural land.

Unlike in developed countries, agriculture in developing countries is hobbled by paralyzing constraints, ranging from lack of indigenous oil supply to financial problems to meet their bills for imported commercial energy. Most developing nations, which need to increase dramatically their farm yields to cope with increasing population , are the biggest sufferers of the oil supply crunch. The scarcity of energy also discourages from mechanization in developing countries.

In fact in our country too, farm mechanization was found to be fruitful to the farmers living in some parts of the plain region. However on the average, this technique is not so appropriate in our country on account of various reasons such as poor economic conditions of the majority of farmers, rugged topography and scarcity of energy

The choice of technology is undoubtedly of paramount importance to bring about substantial development in agriculture of our country. However, if agricultural mechanization is adopted in our country, our scarce capital will not be optimally utilized because only the rich farmers will buy farm machineries and small farmer will resort to traditional ways of farming. Because about 75% of the farmers of our country are small farmers, agricultural development is virtually impossible without their involvement. Since the majority of farmers of our country can not buy farm machinery, farm mechanization has not become so popular in our country.