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    Mini tract­ors spur farm­ers into mech­an­ized ag­ri­cul­ture

    The in­tro­duc­tion of mini tract­ors and power tillers that are 50 per­cent cheaper than con­ven­tional tillers is birth­ing a new farm­ing re­volu­tion, which is now see­ing more small­holder farm­ers enter mech­an­ized ag­ri­cul­ture, tra­di­tion­ally a pre­serve of their large scale coun­ter­parts.

    De­pend­ing on the user speed, on av­er­age, a mini tractor is able to plough about 1 acre in 2 hours.
    The new farm equip­ment is ex­pec­ted to help foster food se­cur­ity and help more farm­ers adopt mod­ern farm­ing tech­niques with an aim of ven­tur­ing into com­mer­cial farm­ing. “For a long time mech­an­ized ag­ri­cul­ture which is glob­ally known for in­creased food pro­duc­tion has been left for a few ‘rich’ com­mer­cial farm­ers. Ma­jor­ity of these farm­ers are for­eign­ers and are mostly en­gaged in flower and other non food agro products. It is be­hind this fact that we felt it ideal to sens­it­ize and fi­nally in­tro­duce these low cost equip­ment and tools to our farm­ers,” ex­plained Vin­cent Odhi­ambo from Nya­bond En­ter­prise the farm which has partnered with VST Tillers and tract­ors, the man­u­fac­turer from India.

    Odhi­ambo and his team have been in­volved in wide­spread sens­it­iz­a­tion cam­paigns about the mini tract­ors and tillers among farm­ers. We star­ted our sens­it­iz­a­tion cam­paigns in Feb­ru­ary 2014. We mainly used posters and videos and tar­get farmer groups and co­oper­at­ives.”

    Sat­is­fied that their tar­get cli­ents were now ready to ac­quire the ma­chiner­ies, the team has now star­ted tra­vers­ing the coun­try with demon­stra­tion tract­ors and equip­ment. “In May this year, we star­ted the demon­stra­tion of how the equip­ment works to the farm­ers and have really re­ceived sev­eral or­ders ran­ging from co­oper­at­ives to in­di­vidual farm­ers,” noted Odhi­ambo.

    Ac­cord­ing to Odhi­ambo, the power tiller has re­ceived more ex­cite­ment among the farm­ers largely due to its af­ford­ab­il­ity and low main­ten­ance costs. The power which is lit­er­ally de­scribed as a walk­ing tractor due to the fact that the user pushes it, costs about Sh300, 000 with a diesel con­sump­tion ca­pa­city of about 1.2litres per hour. “If a ma­chine meant for a sim­ilar job is five times cheaper than the con­ven­tional ones in the mar­ket then of course it’s just lo­gical that most users will go for the cheaper product. The tiller is even bet­ter po­si­tioned than the other tract­ors in the mar­ket when it comes to the low fuel con­sump­tion put­ting in mind that other tract­ors con­sume about 4litres of diesel per hour.”

    Odhi­ambo ex­plained that the tiller is a mul­tipur­pose tool which can also be used for ir­rig­a­tion, spray­ing, pulling a trailer and even elec­tri­city gen­er­a­tion.  The tillers are also said to be suit­able for rice farm­ers be­cause of their other abil­ity to plough in wet sur­faces. For the rice farm­ers, what one does is ex­chan­ging the nor­mal tires with spe­cial metal­lic ones which then suit the rice pad­dies.

    The small port­able nature of the mini tractor and tillers also ac­cord­ing to Odhi­ambo is an as­pect that po­s­i­tions it above other tract­ors. The tillers can be used for in­ter­crop­ping, weed­ing and even ac­cess some ter­rains that are not ac­cess­ible by the large tract­ors. Cur­rently the firm has sold over 100 mini tract­ors a trend Odhi­ambo noted is com­mend­able given that they star­ted selling them two weeks ago.

    Al­though viewed as a new a tech­no­logy in Kenya, the mini tract­ors and power tillers the power tiller tech­no­logy was in­ven­ted in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury to re­place manual plough­ing. With stat­ist­ics in­dic­at­ing that small­holder farm­ers con­trib­ute to over 80 per­cent of food pro­duc­tion, ac­cord­ing to Odhi­ambo, the in­tro­duc­tion of such af­ford­able tech­no­logy will even spur food pro­duc­tion and en­hance ag­ribusi­ness growth in the coun­try.

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