Farm Mechanization: Nature of Development
Agriculture is in transition today, with the coexistence of traditional and mechanized farming. The mechanized inputs and resources have a direct bearing on timeliness and precision of farm operations, increase in production and productivity, higher incom
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Farm Mechanization: Nature of Development
Nature of Farm Mechanization Agriculture is in transition today, with the coexistence of traditional farming and infusion of large machinery. Labour-intensive traditional practices are fast overtaken by the newer adopted manually and power-operated machinery in various farm operations. Equipping people with machinery and devices in doing their daily chores is usually referred to as mechanization. Generally speaking, mechanization connotes the application of machinery, tools, and devices to carry out farm activities as an alternative to those traditionally performed by bullocks, horses, and other draught animals or by human labour. Farm activities cover, for example, seedbed preparation, sowing, weeding, inter-cultivation, spraying, fertilizer application, harvesting, combining, baling, transportation, water-lifting for irrigation, threshing, winnowing, fodder cutting, and feed grinding. Design, development, and application of mechanical aids, motorized equipment and devices in crop production, irrigation control, material handling, storing and processing, dairy applications, oil pressing, cotton ginning, and the like are broadly recognized as the indicators of farm mechanization. The machinery, such as power tillers, tractors, combines, electric motors, harvesters, threshers, and hauling equipment, are the assembles of gears, shafts, chains, belts, knives, and shakers, to perform the desired action either in a stationary position or while moving across a field. The mobile machinery is usually powered by an integral petrol/diesel engine or by a separate driver. There may be partial mechanization when only a part of the farm work is done by machine. Complete mechanization would indicate that the animal or human labour is wholly dispensed with power operated machines. The first commercial tractor powered by petrol was sold in 1902 in the United States. Henry Ford introduced the Fordson tractor during World War I. A tractor provides machine power to perform farm tasks, like pulling of farm implements of various complexities for land tilling, planting, cultivating, spraying of agrochemicals, and harvesting crops, and also for hauling materials and personal transportation.
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 P. K. Nag and L. P. Gite, Human-Centered Agriculture, Design Science and Innovation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7269-2_7
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7 Farm Mechanization: Nature of Development
Often the terms agricultural mechanization and farm mechanization are used synonymously. The agricultural mechanization covers the entire gamut of activities in crop production and processing on or off the farms. On the other hand, farm mechanization focuses on the machinery application within the boundaries of farms, primarily including production machinery for raising crops. For example, the extent of tractor power applied to carry out agricultural operations is often described as the level of tractorization. A whole range of farm machinery is available today that are primarily obser
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