5. Conclusion
Scale-appropriate agricultural mechanization can play an
important role in enhancing the labour productivity of smallholder
farmers. A better understanding of the socioeconomic factors that
influence farmers’ ability to purchase and adopt small-scale agricultural
machineries in South Asia helps inform policy. Service
provision and fee-for-use models extend machinery access to
farmers lacking sufficient capital for actual machinery purchase.
Such understanding is crucial for scaling-out appropriate agricultural
machinery within South Asia and other developing regions.
Based on our review of the literature, relatively little research has
considered these issues, and no prior empirical studies have
employed data at the scale considered in this paper, with 814,058
observations to examine household characteristics, socioeconomic,
and infrastructural variables as they relate to machinery
ownership. Following a brief review of Bangladesh’s historical
policy environment that facilitated the development of agricultural
machinery markets, this paper presents a first-step to fill this
knowledge gap by identifying some of the factors that influence the
ownership of the three most common types of agricultural machineries
in our case study country, namely irrigation pumps, grain
threshers, and power tillers.
The wealth status and land size holding of the sampled
households was significantly and positively related to the ownership
of agricultural machinery at the household level. Those
households that were endowed with more land, cattle and ponds,
were significantly more likely to have adopted and own agricultural
machinery e supporting expectations that capital good
ownership is likely to be positively associated with the owners’
overall resource base. Our data also indicate that civil infrastructure
e primarily the availability of electricity (specifically for
irrigation pumps) e and access to credit services, are both
significantly and positively related to household ownership of
agricultural machinery. Paved or gravel roads at the sub-District
level- were also significantly and positively related with ownership
of irrigation pumps and threshers, though not power tillers.
The lack of influence observed here is most likely because the
2WTs primarily used to drive power tillers are relatively all-terrain
vehicles, and can easily be moved along village paths and unpaved
roads. Conversely for irrigation pumps, road networks are
important for assuring that surplus harvests in irrigated systems
can be efficiently brought to markets; while for threshers, quality
roads are usually required to move equipment to consolidated
threshing points, after which grain is bulked and carried to markets.
Lastly, when farmers had improved access to credit and
loans, either through formal banks or NGOs, machinery ownership
was significantly more common. These findings indicate that the
provision of basic civil infrastructure and services in Bangladesh’s
rural areas appear to be prerequisites to irrigation pump, thresher,
and power tiller ownership by farm households, and by consequence
to the development of rural agricultural machinery service
provision economies, although these data should be verified and
examined for changes over time with the availability of the next
agricultural census data set (anticipated in 2018). We also advise
that data related to service provision arrangements for each machine
should be included in future agricultural censuses, as should
assessment of adoption of new scale-appropriate machineries
such as modular crop reapers and planters that can be operated by
2WTs and which can help increase cropping intensity by reducing
turn-around time between crops. Measures to lower farmers’
production risks and provide credit services should also be
considered as part-and-parcel of mechanization efforts. We
conclude that development agents with an interest in expanding
farmer uptake of agricultural machineries should equally consider
facilitating the necessary pre-conditions to build an enabling
environment for machinery ownership, and thereby encourage
adoption and uptake and enhance the overall efficiency of donor
investments.