Why machines are not very useful in rice cultivation?
Answers
Answer:
Indian farms have been increasingly using various agricultural equipments.
Combines / harvesters are the ones that are widely used as they’re available for hire in areas that cultivate paddy a lot. They’re fast, require very little labour, and do threshing automatically and provide just the grains as output.
Power weeders are occasionally used, though they’re usually not available for hire and a typical power-weeder costs about Rs. 15000 to 35000 that doesn’t suit the budget of the fragmented farmer population. If producer organisations become wide-spread, or farmers buy the power weeders as a co-operative, they may get used widely.
As for paddy transplanters, the transplanting method requires the field to be perfectly levelled. Since the transplanting is done in about 15 to 17 days after seeding, if the field is not level weed management is a huge issue. Uneven fields also result in uneven planting since some transplanters do not properly plant in such cases. Since most farmers are used to planting old seedlings (25 to 30+ days), they view machine transplanting is more troublesome to manage. This again is slowly changing with the subsidies offered by some states for machine transplanted paddy, and by advanced farmers opting for SRI methods.
The adaptation of all these machines can certainly increase given labour shortage if farmer collectives are formed that share machineries.
Explanation:
Indian farms have been increasingly using various agricultural equipments.
Combines / harvesters are the ones that are widely used as they’re available for hire in areas that cultivate paddy a lot. They’re fast, require very little labour, and do threshing automatically and provide just the grains as output.
Power weeders are occasionally used, though they’re usually not available for hire and a typical power-weeder costs about Rs. 15000 to 35000 that doesn’t suit the budget of the fragmented farmer population. If producer organisations become wide-spread, or farmers buy the power weeders as a co-operative, they may get used widely.
As for paddy transplanters, the transplanting method requires the field to be perfectly levelled. Since the transplanting is done in about 15 to 17 days after seeding, if the field is not level weed management is a huge issue. Uneven fields also result in uneven planting since some transplanters do not properly plant in such cases. Since most farmers are used to planting old seedlings (25 to 30+ days), they view machine transplanting is more troublesome to manage. This again is slowly changing with the subsidies offered by some states for machine transplanted paddy, and by advanced farmers opting for SRI methods.
The adaptation of all these machines can certainly increase given labour shortage if farmer collectives are formed that share machineries.
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