Fifty Years of Progress in Agricultural Mechanization

摘要

So much has happened over the past 50 years in the world of appropriate mechanization for smallholder farmers - the target group for AMA. In the past we have seen tractor and machinery hire services, often subsidized, run by public sector agencies. These have rarely been successful (FAO, 2008, p21) mainly due to inefficiencies (eg.: a high percentage of travel time, small and scattered plots, difficulties in receiving payments for services rendered, high levels of down time due to problems of servicing and accessing replacement parts and inappropriate civil service bureaucratic management systems - Fig. 1).