Abstract

  The April 25, 2015 earthquake (with 7.6 Richter scale) and its subsequent aftershocks have had both direct and indirect impact on people’s agriculture and livelihoods. Machine users after earthquake were increased in this territory. Machineries reduce the working load and human drudgery. Farmers are facing increased price of cost of inputs like organic fertilizers, seeds along with labor charge for weeding, sowing and harvesting because of poor adoption of mechanization. Farm mechanization refers to application of engineering and technology in farm to perform farm works in better and precise way and increase productivity of farm and reduce the cost of production. Hence the drastic need to improve living standard of farmers through the adoption and adaptation of improved agricultural technologies. The maize zone, Sindhupalchok areas under PMAMP program was selected for this study. The total 120 households of the three municipalities were select by using purposive and simple random sampling technique. The secondary data were collected from reports from DADO office, SQCC, MoAD and CBS. The primary data were collected from household survey from pre-tested semi structured questionnaire and Focus Group Discussion (FGD). The collected data analyzed by using Microsoft Excel, SPSS software and Stata. Descriptive statistics, benefit cost ratio, mean t-test, chi square test, etc. were computed and compared between machine user and bullock user. Probit regression model was used to analyze factors affecting mini-tiller adoption. Machine users included only the mini-tiller users for land preparation that means in hilly areas of Sindhupalchok mechanization is in transformation phase. Social status of both machine users and bullock users were found comparable with age and ethnicity had negative and positive significant difference respectively. Most of the farmers purchased machine with subsidies from district agriculture development office (DADO), Sindhupalchok. but farmers can’t afford machineries directly from machineries supplier/dealer due to the high price of machineries. The average yield of maize was found to be 2.17 MT/ha in the study area from respondants response. Most of the mini-tiller users plow land two times and bullock users plow land three times. Both the users were in loss i.e. machine user’s loss NRs.15311 and bollock user’s loss NRs. 43125 in maize production in one hectare land with the B:C ratio of 0.88 and 0.63 respectively but farmers perceived their practice to be in profit as they did not consider the monetary value of two major cost of production, FYM cost and labor cost. Most of the farmer’s perception, working load and human drudgery was decreased by 50 percent. This research revealed that insect pest was ranked first problems in machine user farmers and agri-mechanization was the first ranked problems in bullock user farmers in the study area.

Keywords: Machine; Bullock; Mini-Tiller; Maize; Seed

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Citation

Citation: Chiranjibi Shrestha. “Impacts of Mechanization and Improved Seed Adoption in Maize Production in Earthquake Affected Areas of Sindhupalchok, Nepal".Acta Scientific Agriculture 4.1 (2020): 128-135.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Chiranjibi Shrestha. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.