Agricultural Mechanization

horpey (73)in #stemng • 7 years ago (edited)

Agricultural Mechanization is the combination of two different words Agricultural and Mechanization in contracted to AgricMechanization.

Agricultural: is the cultivation of plants and rearing of Animals for human usage. Agriculture has played a vital role in our lives I believe without Agricultural nobody will exist today because there will be no enough nutrition for human and animal to be alive.

Mechanization: is the replacement working largely of both human and animal power with machinery.
Every machine is designed for a purpose this enhances and increase work productivity in the modern days, many machines have been invented even the machine which can perform multiple actions.

Machines, in fact, is interposed between the power and the work, for the purpose of adapting the one to the other.
source:

Definition Agricultural Mechanization

I will make this short and concise Agricultural Mechanization; is the act of replacing both human and animal power in Agriculture.

2018-02-01 05_21_11-a-i6044e.pdf - Foxit Reader.png
source

Short History

Back in Ancient colonial days, we used hands and Draught Animal in farming; By the early 20th century machines developed the ability to perform more complex operations that had previously been done by skilled craftsmen. An example is the glass bottle making machine developed 1905. It replaced highly paid glass blowers and child labour helpers and led to the mass production of glass bottles which we now see many machines today.

After 1900 factories were electrified, and electric motors and controls were used to perform more complicated mechanical operations. This resulted in mechanized processes to manufacture almost all goods.

Reasons for changing the power source for crop production from muscles (human or animal) to tractors:

Pixabay

Potential to expand the area under cultivation.

Ability to perform operations at the right time to maximize production potential.

Multifunctionality – tractors can be used, not only for crop production but also for transportation, stationary power applications and infrastructure improvement (drainage and irrigation canals and roadworks).

Compensation for seasonal labour shortages (or, indeed, the release of labour for more productive work.

Reduction of the drudgery associated with the use of human muscle power for tasks, such as hand hoeing for primary tillage – especially important in tropical areas where high temperatures and humidity (sometimes associated with inadequate nutrition) make manual work extremely arduous.

In spite of these perceived benefits and the fact that animals had been largely replaced by tractors in both the United States and Western Europe by the 1950s, arguments were still put forward urging caution in the developing world (as highlighted by FAO, 2008). The main preoccupation was the effect of mechanization on rural employment opportunities. At the time, it was not understood that mechanization affected mainly on-farm family employment, not hired labour. Mechanization, in fact, enables farm family members not only to increase farm productivity via production intensification and/or expansion but also to seek off-farm employment opportunities as a result of the increased time made available to look for and be engaged in such employment. Moreover, it was not appreciated that mechanization applied only to specific farm production tasks (in particular land preparation), and consequently had little effect on hired labour unemployment as previously presumed. The International Food Policy Research Institute IFRP, enriches the debate on the social factors associated with mechanization by pointing out that in the past, forced mechanization was associated with the displacement of tenant farmers and rural labour. However, in Africa, mechanization is more likely to increase labour demand when it enables more land to be cultivated (and when it is profitably applied along the value chain). IFPRI points out that mechanization is just one component in the agricultural intensification process; mechanization should not actually initiate intensification where it is not already driven by population pressure and market demand. IFPRI quotes Boserup (1965) in this respect and concludes that there are many areas where demand for mechanization has emerged from the smallholder sector.
source

The number of 4-wheel tractors as an indicator of advancement in

Source

Mechanization, FAO (2008) reports the following trends over the past 40 years from 1961 - 2000

In Asia, tractor numbers increased fivefold between 1961 and 1970, from 120,000 to 600,000 units. Thereafter, the number increased tenfold, reaching 6 million units in 2000. Numbers have since continued to increase, especially in India, where tractors numbered 2.6 million in 2010 (FAO, 2013a), and China, where they numbered over 2 million in 2008 (FAO, 2013b).

In Latin America and the Caribbean, tractor numbers increased 1.7 times between 1961 and 1970, from 383,000 to 637,000 units, and thereafter tripled to reach 1.8 million in 2000.

In the Near East, the picture is similar to Latin America, as tractor numbers doubled from 126 000 to 260,000 between 1961 and 1970 and then increased 6.5 times to reach 1.7 million in 2000.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the trend has been rather different. In 1961, the number of tractors in use (172,000) exceeded the number both in Asia and in the Near East. They then increased slowly, peaking at 275,000 in 1990 before declining to 221,000 in 2000.