a b s t r a c t
There is strong advocacy for agricultural machinery appropriate for smallholder farmers in South Asia.
Such ‘scale-appropriate’ machinery can increase returns to land and labour, although the still substantial
capital investment required can preclude smallholder ownership. Increasing machinery demand has
resulted in relatively well-developed markets for rental services for tillage, irrigation, and post-harvest
operations. Many smallholders thereby access agricultural machinery that may have otherwise been
cost prohibitive to purchase through fee-for-service arrangements, though opportunity for expansion
remains. To more effectively facilitate the development and investment in scale-appropriate machinery,
there is a need to better understand the factors associated with agricultural machinery purchases and
service provision. This paper first reviews Bangladesh’s historical policy environment that facilitated the
development of agricultural machinery markets. It then uses recent Bangladesh census data from
814,058 farm households to identify variables associated with the adoption of the most common
smallholder agricultural machinery e irrigation pumps, threshers, and power tillers (mainly driven by
two-wheel tractors). Multinomial probit model results indicate that machinery ownership is positively
associated with household assets, credit availability, electrification, and road density. These findings
suggest that donors and policy makers should focus not only on short-term projects to boost machinery
adoption. Rather, sustained emphasis on improving physical and civil infrastructure and services, as well
as assuring credit availability, is also necessary to create an enabling environment in which the adoption
of scale-appropriate farm machinery is most likely.
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license